Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Reading books or reading about writers: Which is more exciting?

The question is more relevant at this era of screen reading. Book reading has now become an academic issue that cannot be helped. This is not a judgment article of ethics; so concentration is more on the inquiry of excitement.
A life of Hemingway has so much elements to make one excited that the biography itself becomes a novel. It may be true to all writers. Because, every great writer created masterpieces from own life-time experiences. Shakespeare, Goethe, Edgar Ala Poe, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, James Joyce- every milestone in our world of literature became icons of lifestyle. We all know two or more stories about them. Why did Shakespeare wrote ‘Romeo and Juliet’ or what kind of extramarital platonic love Goethe had in his life etc. But how about reading ‘Romeo and Juliet’ or ‘Faust’?
To most of the readers, unless he is devoted to literature, these books are hard to go through; for their language and high standard of poetic aesthetics. So we are contended by knowing about the theme of the masterpiece. Romeo loved Juliet and they had some family disputes to face. But a poetic dialogue of Romeo! Heaven save us! Read the life of Shakespeare and find out the incidences and experiences of him those inspired him to write it. That would be more exciting.
Just take a poll on how many people like to read the books and how many like to read about the writers. My experience is, most of the people think that the book ought to be read but the writer’s life is more interesting. Why these things happen? There can be two explanations. One is very simple. Most of the people do not bother about poetic or artistic aesthetics of literature. They read something that is easy going. When a classic novel, poem or any other form of literature earn fame by authors and specialists they just become curious. Some of them try to get into it. They go to find the root of the fame in the person not the work.
The other explanation is little complicated and of course may be controversial. An individual live a life that is more or less meaningless to him. The usual livings make him tired. It’s hard for him to lay faith on anything great unless that is heavenly and comfort him thinking of next life. Reading a biography of a writer gives him the sense that even a great writer’s life had not much meaning as his. There was love, there was failure, there was anger and there was hatred. The difference is of skill; one could write one cannot. Just a skill can’t make a life more meaningful.
If any writer, sociologist, philosopher or poet read this article I will be highly obliged to have his or her comments on this analysis.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Make your own cyber home

I think you will agree with me that the world has surprisingly changed into a web. The web has laid all out effect on our lifestyle, vocabularies, business and thought process. Once we all had an address of our houses (at least readers are not homeless, I suppose) and delivered others to come and a visit. Now the IP took place of a home. Now `home’ means more of a page than a house. The page you can decorate yourself, put colors in it, have written yourselves in it and then invite others to have a visit there. Maybe you can’t serve tea, but that’s the good thing for you because you don’t have to expend any money for a guest. On the contrary the guest can bring you some money!
If you don’t have a web address yet, this article is for you. You know, having a web address is not that impossible thing. It’s easy and lots of services available there offering you free templates. But it is like residing in a furnished house in another one’s taste and not having any right to change the sofas or beds.
You may leave a deep breath now and think that, oh I do not know how to build a house or furniture of mine. Besides, I don’t have any spare money to buy a domain name. So here is the relevance of this article. Without knowing anything of peculiar computer languages or web jargons, one can have a professional looking web site.
Yes, it can be had free with just little time and effort. Well, if you want to decorate your own home it will also take some time for thinking or designing! A computer with a good speed internet connection will do all for you.
Just download a program name `macromedia dreamweaver’ or `adobe dreamweaver’ from any free download site. You can click here to get the link.
Then you need to register with a site name, webatu. Registration is completely free, as easy as opening a email account and in five minutes you can have your own control panel. What is a control panel? It’s like your plumbers or laborers waiting for your command to put the furniture of yours as you command. We will come to that in a short while. Give a unique name of your home on the registration form. As it is a free service you have to tolerate a tail of the providers’ name. The name webatu will appear after your site’s name. Only some money can fix this and give you full control of your name.

Now let me make one thing clear. I am not giving you the tits bits of learning dreamweaver or handling webatu. All i want to do here is a give a hint through which you can teach yourself how to do the rest of the things.

Learning dreamweaver for professional purpose takes long time. You are not going to that direction. Or you would if you find the interest but that is not what we are dealing about now. A coommon idea on MS word will do all. If you know a little bit of Illustrator, you will have o problem to proceed. Open the dreamweaver program. It will ask you which mode you want to open. Choose `designer’ mode. And for file system, choose html.

Now on the top right corer you will find a drop down menu mentioning- `common', `layout' etc. Choose `layout'. You will find three table looking boxes beside it. Choose the third one. With this you can draw a box in the main large white design area. After drawing the box, write anything in it, like your home name. Open the property box below the design area and choose your desired format for what you have just typed. Save the file as `index.html'. Its your homepage. Everything you do, write or put image- just draw a box from layout. Then insert anything. Inserting image or flash file options can be found on the `common' menu.

Next, plan about your entire house. How many rooms there should be? Home page will contain as many buttons as there are rooms or pages in your site. Make other pages following exactly the same procedure above.

Now, to upload your files, go to your webatu control panel. It will demand your password to let you get enter. Go to the file manager, then click `public folder'. There you will find the upload button. Click it and show the program from where it should upload. Uploading the pages will not work, unless you do the same to supporting files. Suppose, you inserted `a.jpg' on index page. Then you have to upload the `a.jpg' file along with the index page. After finishing uploading, preview the site. There you go. Here is your cyber home.

You can host some advertisements those can generate a few dollars to your account. Thats another history. I will tell you details aother time. Now try what i have told you here ad if you find any problem dont hestitate to mail me at ultragreyarea@gmail.com. I will be your free service provider, any time.

Sunday, October 4, 2009