Have you ever wanted to write a book?


Well, here’s your chance! If you are a budding writer in India, you can now self-publish your books through [[http://pothi.com|Pothi.com]], an online venture by two of my good friends.


Always wanted to publish that book of yours? But found that it was too much of a hassle following up with publishers? The alternative is to self-publish. Retain the control over your content, timing and earnings from your book. With [[http://pothi.com|Pothi.com]], you can self publish your book **WITHOUT any upfront cost** in India. And you publish a **real, printed book**, not just an e-book. Sell it in our marketplace, buy copies for yourself or gift it to your loved ones!

Or do you work for an organization who would want to publish reports, memorabilia etc. without worrying about demand estimation first. You may be an NGO trying to reach out to your existing and potential patrons. Or a group from a college trying to publish a yearbook for limited circulation.
Pothi.com is your destination.

And all this is made possible by **Print on Demand** technology for books brought in India by Pothi.com. Now you can print one copy or thousands of copies as the need be.

See the presentation for writers at [[http://pothi.com/pothi/files/AuthorPresentationV3.pps]]

The books currently available at Pothi.com are here -
[[http://pothi.com/pothi/buy]]

Google Reader auto sort


[[http://reader.google.com|Google Reader]] offers several options for [[http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?answer=69980&topic=12012|sorting feed items]]. After having played around with the “auto-sort” for several months now, I am reverting back to “Sort by newest”.

{{ http://www.google.com/googlereader/images/logo_reader.gif|Google Reader}}

The problem is that the auto-sort mode is a little too simplistic. Here’s what it does in their own words:


//This works by prioritizing subscriptions with fewer items. So, with this setting, your friend’s blog with one item a month will not be drowned out by higher volume sites such as the New York Times because we’ll raise the blog to the top.//

The general idea behind auto-sort is good, but unfortunately the execution hasn’t evolved at all to become smarter. For instance, some blogs I read haven’t been updated in a while. And I’m really not interested in the stuff they wrote some months back. So I never read those few old posts and yet they continue to hang around at the top of my feeds, which gets annoying quickly.

Ideally, the auto-sort should also take into account my reading trends (they obviously collect all this data, so might as well use it). In my case, what I really want the auto-sort to do is this: if there are some old posts and I’m consistently choosing not to read them, then perhaps they don’t need to be raised to the top any more. If I need to find them, I can always do so. In fact, I wouldn’t even mind if the old posts were raised to the top of the list once in a while.

An even smarter auto-sort will also take into account my reading habits. If there’s an infrequently updated blog that I read religiously, then I definitely don’t want to miss even an old post, no matter what. Similarly, old posts from an inactive blog that I have stopped following should be given less weight.

How do you sort your feeds?