Funny thing is even I chose 18, but I have no idea why I did so. All my last three posts were on the 18th of each month. And I didn’t do it intentionally…

Does it have anything to do with the number 9? 1+8=9. Beats me!

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So what did I learn from the whole process:
Its not as simple as buying a domain name and installing drupal. Then it will be one among thousands of other sites. If you want to be the one site, then it needs to be distinctive. Two components that most people overlook are content and design. You must have something to offer to the visitors, not something you gathered from the web through feeds which drupal easily accomplishes. Content must attract visitors and keep them coming back for more. I had a rough idea on what the content of indianorthodoc.org would be. I had decided that it should be driven by user contributions. But when I looked at sites like The Morning News it became clear that quality was more important than quantity. A magazine would fit my requirements more easily than a CMS. The periodical nature of output would give me time to acquire and publish articles that made sense.

Its amazing how one thing leads to another. The same paper had an excellent design feel to it unlike the usual paper like say The New York Times . Both of them were powered by Drupal but TNYT was crammed up while TMN was more easy on the eyes. I learnt later from this book how whitespace can make a big difference in designing a site. But how could I achieve white space? It required the art of layout and layout in website is achieved by manipulating CSS.

You have to look at a few CSS websites to see what I mean. People can really great creative with css. csszengarden had been one of the early sites to effectively demonstrate the use of css in designing sites. But take a look at others like cssbeauty and cssmania. One thing that struck me was that most of these sites belonged to the creative kind of people …artists, a different league all together. I didn’t want to stretch my site all that far. But I was certain about one issue now, I couldn’t just use the default css design that came with drupal. I had to have a design that I could call my own. Two sites that had some interesting articles on css were Sitepoint and AListApart. Both the sites practised what they preached, excellent design with relevant articles and plenty of white space.

So until I get an idea about what css is and how I can exploit its use in designing my site, indianorthodoc.org will have to wait.

Technorati Tags: css, website, design, orthodoc

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So I changed the name servers at the domain host (GoDaddy) from google servers to Computing Host servers. Drupal was up and I was on my way to configuring it. In this context the Drupal cookbook, which is listed in the Drupal website is a no-frills documentation of getting your feet wet with Drupal.

At this moment the mail, calendar and the docs became inaccessible. So what I did was create sub domains at the web host through cpanel. And had them redirect to the google servers. It seemed to work. I modified the earlier picture to one with the new logo.

However one major problem still persisted. I did not have a user sign up page for the google apps services. Secondly I am not sure if drupal and the mail service of google will be compatible. In other words users may have to sign up twice, one for the user id on the drupal site and another for the google servers. I am sure they will find it very annoying. So that issue will keep me preoccupied for the weekend!!

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And this is what I first landed up with:

It looked fine with me, after all I didn’t want to spend too much time on a silly logo. But my wife couldn’t stand it. What does it mean?? It looks funny, that’s what she said. So I modified it a little bit more:

trying my best to convince myself that it couldn’t get better than this. I even got a favicon working.

I was using drupal for my site, another open source CMS. It just didn’t match the drupal icon.

I noticed how the icon was small and yet so large. Being spherical in size it seemed to occupy all the 64×64 icon space. So I changed my mind to work on a spherical model. I had been working on the crooked tree picture

sometime back and had saved it in png image format. Gave it a try and this is what I came up with.

But then the site background was also green, and there seemed to be no contrast between the two. It just didn’t stand out! So I played around with the background and finally settled for lemon yellow.

The icon was finally beginning to shape up. I enlarged the central image to fill up my icon. I was also having trouble adjusting my site name. It seemed too long to be a title. So I decided to include it in the logo. Wanted the title to be more clear so added shadow and made it bold to improve its appearance. And this is what I finally came up with:

It still doesn’t look perfect to me. For one the title is crowded and secondly it seems to be going beyond the equator. But for the moment I am going to use this logo. My site has got an identity now! Hooray!!

Tags: Logo, Orthodoc, drupal

The field of Orthopaedic Surgery is exploding!!

There is so much to learn today. All that we learnt during our post graduation is so out dated that sometimes I get frustrated. Constantly whenever I browse the net I keep my eyes open for material worthy of notice. Most of the material is of two main types: either a busy surgeon with a webpage that is loaded with information which is more of a web page filler rather than being informative or it is a big-notch company that is trying to sell its equally big-notch product. The latter are heavily biased in their delivery of information towards the product they sell. In other words, both the types are grossly inadequate. Of course there are exceptions, but they are rare or out dated.There is a need for more informative material for both the student and the patient. Someplace where the person can visit to collect reliable info. Something on the lines of an OKO or the emedicine portals. While the former is a paid site, the latter is very limited. There were a few learning materials available in the NEJM site but then this requires a subscription.

I have been looking at Wikibooks for quite some time now. A book on Orthopaedic Surgery is also listed but contribution is scanty and the book has lain empty. Wikiversity could be the ideal ground for development of some teaching material. Teaching today, goes beyond books. With the availabilty of digital cameras and excellent presentation software it should not be hard to create materials like slide presentations or even instructional videos. And once we have some material then we can have some basic courses set up as well.

But am pretty unsure about how to get collaborators onto the projects. The fact that there are so many open-source projects with community contribution in other subjects, it makes me wonder when we will have the same situation in Orthopaedic Surgery.

You may say I am a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you will join us,
And the world would live as one…
John Lennon.

Technorati Tags: Orthopaedic, Online learning, Wikiversity

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From a long time now Google has been a de-facto search engine …and I have been using it almost always for hunting down stuff in the web. Its search results have been satisfying. However, sometimes in the past, I have used it to hunt down medical information and have been, more often than not left high and dry. Is that the reason why they came up with Google Scholar? I don’t know! But at that point of time I assumed that if I didn’t get it by googling then it probably did not exist. Now to think of it …what a dangerous thing to do!! I presumed that Google was not perfect and that missing out on information was not intentional. I was content with whatever it was dishing out …that is until I started blogging. The first blog was in blogger, who can go by this blog host especially when it is on offer from the mighty google and co! But then, being the restless guy I am I kept on experimenting until I hit upon wordpress. You could tweak it around until it hurt your fingers. I had a blog running immediately, and the fact that it was open source somehow made me think it was the alternative to blogger. But then the free host wordpress.com had its own limitations. So I went on my search again and finally settled for edublogs.org. In the end I had three blogs by three different hosts. The first month with all the pumped up enthusiasm I went on a blogging spree at the edublogs site. Suddenly I wondered about how my blog figured or rather ranked (am a measly human being after all!) in the search engines. What happened really threw me off the block. All the blogs had the same name and though I was not blogging so much at the blogger website, that blog seemed to top always in the google search. Hokay, maybe …google had not yet crawled through my other sites. I submittted the sites specifically to google. Gave it some time and checked again. No, blogger would always come out on the top. I skipped to Yahoo Search …and this time to my surprise the edublogs site, which I was actually using for blogging came out up front. And not until had I deleted the blog from blogger did the same happen with google.

That made me firm on two issues:

1. Keep my blog away from the blogger platform
2. To use other search engines as well

I am not saying google is horrible …it still remains one of the best search engines but somwhere along the line it is failing. If it continues to come up with biased information like this it is bound to fail miserably. I think this is what monopoly does to most of us. So when I hear about Google taking up YouTube or Jotspot something inside me tells me its not right …and makes me very uncomfortable.

So as far as blogging is concerned technorati beats google blog search anyday.

When I see search engines like Guruji …I feel all is not lost! What I like about Guruji is that it is India Specific. It can also deliver info that is city specific, this I believe has been possible through Infomedia (Yellow pages group). Guruji may never make it to getting even close to Google India but only time will tell if it will survive this big bad world that we so lovingly call the world wide web.

Tags: Google, Guruji

For Patients

You get to see more or less what your doc would be doing if you are planning to have a particular surgery done in the near future. Most of the surgical videos have a moderator who in conversation with the operating surgeon reveals the premise of the surgery. You get to know the details of an operative procedure as you keep watching it being performed. You can even mail in your questions for the moderator to answer live! This is not for the weak-hearted who feel queasy on seeing blood. But nevertheless you can switch off the screen when you like and listen to the commentary instead. A schedule is put up by about a month’s advance. Fear not, if you are busy or missed one. They have most of the surgeries archived …they call it OR-Replay. They even have a search box provided and you can pull out the surgical video if you know the surgery by its name. You need a Windows Media Player to run all the videos. Since it is a streaming video a net connection with decent speeds is necessary. Those with ordinary dial-ups can wait for the entire video to load before playing it. Otherwise they will have to watch it in bits. Mind you, the surgeries are quite long, more than an hour at least, so be prepared and keep yourself free. All of these surgeries are performed in the US so the intended audience is per se Americans.

For Surgeons

Most of the conferences these days have a live demo by a senior, experienced and trained surgeon. OR-Live is nothing but an extension of the same demo. The intended audience is world wide. This is most likely to appeal to juniors and students very well. Senior surgeons will always remain skeptical! For example, the two-incision MIS Hip replacement is yet to pick up in India. Seeing the surgery being performed live is a good introduction to the subject in question. But in no way is it sufficient enough to learn and start doing it on your own.

Pros and Cons

This is the age of information and any information is always welcome, especially about surgeries that have always been performed behind closed doors. Seeing it with your own eyes will beat any description of it. Is it informative? Yes it is, you have a moderator to make the sessions interactive. You also have a slide display by the side with diagrammatic representations of the surgery in progress. What I found disturbing is that most of the procedures web cast are relatively new procedures …the ones that involve new or difficult instrumentation. Ideally the site should be web casting the most commonly done procedures. It is not difficult to understand the reason behind this. Most of these procedures are sponsored by the companies involved. And the industry’s concern about selling a new product is only well known. But then on the other hand I can’t help appreciating their involvement in the educative process. Ultimately from the patients’ standpoint we benefit from the surgery more than anyone else. Surgeons require a more serious debate centered around the procedure in question. Such a web site is unlikely to provide the necessary platform. They are best served by conferences involving members of their own fraternity. Certain online journals, particularly New England Journal of Medicine, have attempted to host videos of procedures. But these are of the most basic nature and concern routine ward procedures. Others like Wikiversity have expressed intentions and hold a lot of promise to produce quality learning tools, but are still a long way from bearing any fruit. Until then surgeons have to do with sites like OR-Live.

Update: Those familiar with youtube.com can look out for the user ORLIVEDOTCOM. You will find most of their videos you want at You Tube. Good Luck.

Tags: Live Surgery, Orthodoc, Orthopedic Surgery

That was a long break I took. Sorry about guys who kept returning to find out about me. Apologies to Scanman for not having responded to his tagging. I am sure he has forgotten about it by now. I got caught in my work and staid away from the net just to prove to myself that I was not addicted to surfing. Apologies to Moof as well. Going off un-announced was uncalled for, whatever the reason maybe. There are those un-named people who make visits to my site. Sorry about not posting for such a long time. Of course, before I forget, interfer-on, I am sorry I could not reply to your comment earlier. My guess about you being in Australia was totally off the mark. I was trying to trace you down via your internet connection. Silly of me! I didn’t realise that all the internet connection in South India comes through a huge cable from Australia via Singapore.

Secondly form the middle of October, my site had been the target of comment spam. It was my host Edublogs rather that was the target. Our site admin attempted anti-spam measures that prevented me from logging into my site! My IP was being accused of being the source of spam. Goodness lord!! So I decided to lay off the site and the net for a while. Looks to me the site admin has installed akismet and things are back to normal.

I can log back in and thank heavens! I am no longer a criminal.

Back to blogging form the next week. I have a lot to catch up on.

Tags: OrthoDoc

I was interacting with wikibookians over an issue when I chanced upon Jean-Pierre Petit in a note made by Xavier in Wikibooks. JPP was from France, and is a scientist by profession. I think the word maverick would describe him nicely. He is into physics and has written several books on various topics. He has been in some controversy over some contentious issues. Read about them in wikipedia.The more interesting bit is that many of the books he has authored are actually comics!! The french have always been famous for their comics. Tintin and Asterix have always been on the top of my list. So why not have science comics? JPP has elaborated on several such topics through the eyes of a character, Archie. On a pesonal level, since my interest in Physics is not academic but only personal, this unconventional method of learning made for some out-of-the-ordinary reading. I have not gone through all of them but the ones that I read were indeed interesting. Suddenly lot of physics was becoming clear to me.

Several of these comics have been around in the market for many years now. But recently his contract with his publishers expired and he decided it was time to do something with them. He put them up in a server for all the rest of us to download. Since they were in french they needed some translation to do. Most of the comics are translated into several languages.
The English PDF versions have been done by John Murphy and are available for download at another site, savoir-sans-frontieres or knowledge without borders. They are available to everyone completely free of cost. If anyone is intersted in translating the comics they are most welcome to contact him. His id is provided at the site. The textless versions are also available for download.

This raises two issues to my mind.

1. There is a lot of activity in the non-english speaking communities that we are never exposed to. And because pictures make words redundant comics are one of the best means of exchanging ideas among two language distinct communities. I strongly believe that we need to open more channels of exchange in order for us to progress ahead
2. Secondly it is intersting to note how the web has enabled JPP to reach out to a more wider audience than he has had until now. The community has literally done all of the translation. The web has done something that his publishers could not do all these years. Cost of production has become irrelevant in this medium. Money is no longer a barrier to the spread of knowledge and this excites me a lot.

Of late there have been several endeavours to achieve dissemination of knowledge free of cost, Wikibooks being the most notable among them. However, I do not know how many of these will sustain long enough to produce products worthy of mentioning. Only time will tell!

Tags: Science Comics, Jean-Pierre Petit, Savoir-sans-frontiers

I was tagged by Scanman in his post A literary tag.

One book that changed my life?

Years ago when I was a student of Science, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes taught me that Science does not have the answers to everything in life. This book changed my perception of medical science. In India it is available online only at Firstandsecond.

One book I have read more than once?

Without any doubt the entire Sherlock Holmes collection by Arthur Conan Doyle. The fact that the great detective was based on Dr Joseph Bell, made it more attractive to me. I would never tire of reading any Sherlock Holmes mystery.

One book I would want on a desert island?

Can’t think of any!

One book that made me laugh?

I remember the Asterix comics. They were outrightly hilarious. As a child I loved the fisticuffs and the cool way Obelisk bashed up the Romans. When I grew up to understand the funny names and the hidden puns, it made for even better reading. Hey I think I could do with Asterix and Tintin to keep me company on a lonely island!

One book that made me cry?

I think Tuesdays with Morrie was very warm and moving.

One book that I wish had been written?

Rang De Basanti was a hit Hindi movie in 2006. I thought the idea of interspersing the revolutionaries of our freedom struggle with the 6 young people from today’s fun-crazy youth was very interesting. It would have made a great book.

One book I wish had never been written?

Personally I think everyone has and should have the freedom to write and express himself. I really can’t come up with one but maybe …if I think hard!

One book I am currently reading?

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta. Bombay is one city I have never visited but have always admired from a distance. I could not appreciate the author’s style of writing but the book gives an interesting account of events among the vast people of this magnificient city.

One book I have been meaning to read?

Surely You’re Joking by Richard Feynman. Ever since my Physics teacher mentioned it in his class some 15 years ago, I have been wanting to read it. I have come across the book several times in bookstores but have never mustered the courage to pick it up! I wonder why??

Whom to tag now?

1. Dr Vishaal Bhat in Medical Ramblings has caught my eye for quite some time now.
2. I seem to like the name manduka (The Frog)
3. I have been visiting Just a little something by Anita Bora at times.
4. A poet’s home in A Walk in the clouds by Megha
5. Interfer-on, a friend of mine who has gone missing after his marriage. Hope to draw him out to post more at his blog Islets of Longer Horns.

Ok fellas now its your turn.

Tags: Books, Tagging