If you are on the new Blogger, then you might be wondering how to display your latest posts on your sidebar. The old Blogger used to allow a display of upto 10 of the last posts. Now the new Blogger doesn’t have any such feature.

You can run your blog feed through the Feed Page Element and have the latest 5 posts on display. But 5?? Those five might already be there on your blog mainpage.

So we using Blogger blogs are often searching around on the web how to display at least 10 or more of our latest posts on the sidebar. Of course this is not a new discussion and many experts have written about it. There are hacks by Hoctro, Hackosphere, and Beautiful Beta.

However if you do not want all that modifications in the above hacks, there is another way to get the last 15 (or all) posts using Feedburner BuzzBoost. Of course you need to using Feedburner for this.

What is BuzzBoost? According to Feedburner, BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed’s content as go-anywhere HTML. To set this up, log in to your Feedburner account, go to the ‘Publicise’ tab, choose ‘BuzzBoost’, and follow the instructions there, and activate the service. On the page that followed, copy the html code into your blog where you want the latest posts to appear.

There are some customisation options available with this service. For instance, you can set the number of items to display, option of displaying the item author name, displaying parts of the item contents, etc. There are instructions given there on how you can apply your own styles. To see a live example, check out the ‘Latest posts’ column at the bottom of this blog.

By the way, I’m not a techie and this is just an alternative I discovered, and thought might be useful to someone.

This is called the YouTube for authors and readers of short stories. The site is called 1000 keyboards. I have no clue if this will become as big as YouTube. However, the concept is interesting and unique.

There are 8 categories of stories - comedy, drama, fan fiction, fantasy and sci-fi, horror, mystery & crime, romance, and thriller. There are other categories like Popular authors, Popular stories, New stories, Top recent stories, etc. you can search for stories by tags as well.

I wonder why will writers submit their stories when they are not getting any rewards for it. I read somewhere that writers who say they don’t write for money are either liars or idiots. And I completely adhere to the philosophy. I mean you completely write your heart out and that becomes the content of some website and they earn million of advertising bucks from it. I write on ezine articles just to get a link love. That’s all. That said, there are those who will say ‘we write because we love to write and money doesn’t matter’. Well, if YouTube can work, maybe so this can. Or is this different? Let’s see.

And I do want to test the waters and see how it goes. Possible benefit I can guess is that there is a 0.1% chance somebody notices my writing and wants to become my publisher. Let’s see that too.

As an occasional fiction-writer, I have submitted an old story of mine called Night of Dying. Simply put, it is about an old man and one night. Check it out and feel free to leave your comments or rate the story.

Here is a section of the story -

He passes by the dry garden, round the thorny shrubs and finally the yellow-leaves path. He recognises them by their dark magnitudes. The night has its advantages. Everything is black while daylight would have mockingly displayed their piteousness.

The dusty veranda stands ahead but yet he has to overcome five steps to reach the top.

He pauses. He stops and looks around. Is there a whisper? From behind the trees? Surely it can’t the trees. They can only lament - life is getting raped over and over again. He knows his is different, a bit. He pulls himself towards the trees. He knows he is brave. He used to be. And strong. Yet a cloud of trepidation and qualms hangs above his head and inside his fainted heart. Every step leads to an area darker than the previous. He eagers to look back. But he daren’t. And he can’t go any further.

The full story is here. This is my profile page at 1000 keywords.

I would love it if 1000 keyboards integrate their services with blogs and social networking sites. suppose I have a blog where I write my short stories. Can I publish them on 1000Keyboards simultaneously through my RSS feed? also, can I display my stories on 1000 keywords on Facebook? If enabled, this would become an useful tool then to many.

I need to be able to edit my story as well. What if I see some mistakes or want to make it better after submitting it.

1&1 is perhaps the best domain registrar I have come across. With a price as low as USD 6.99 a year, I can have any dot com registered. Compare that with Godaddy and Yahoo and other registrars, and you will realize that 1&1’s pricing is the most competitive. It even comes cheaper than the standard Indian registrar’s fee of Rs. 499.00 a year (around USD 12.00 or so).

The service also provides a dashboard from where you can mix and edit the DNS and MX settings. You get an email address on your custom domain and five sub domains free of cost. The customer service is prompt and I receive replies to my emails in a few hours. I cannot say the same for the support service on the phone.

Besides these, the most important reasons for me to choose 1&1 were:

1. Free private registration - Anybody can check my contact details from my domain on the whois register. Private registration is a feature that basically means your registrar puts its name in your place on the whois database so that your information is not public, thus saving you from many spam messages. Not a big deal for many, but if you do not want to disclose your details so much for any reason, private registration becomes important. I checked with many Indian registrars and such an option was rare to find here. 1&1 provides this for free . Compare that to Godaddy that provides this feature at USD 8.00 extra.

2. As someone tinkering around with Blogger custom domain and Google Apps, I find it much easier to use a registrar that is recognized enough by Google to provide instructions on navigating through the registrar’s system. Here is the explanation for configuring Wordpress and connecting to my MySQL database.

Now one thing to be wary of while registering multiple domains with 1&1:

If you are using the ‘Instant domain’ package like me, and plans to register multiple domains; do NOT go into your dashboard and click ‘Add new domain’ to add one. Doing so will make your new domain as part of the package you already have with your first domain.

Remember you can get only five sub domains with one package. People, like me, will often assume that they will get five sub domains with one domain registration. 1&1 customer service mentioned on its mail that five free sub domains is per package and not per domain. So if you add a new domain under your current package, you will still be get only 5 sub domains irrespective of the number of domains you add. This happened with me and it was confusing and irritating. I think they should have put this warning up while I was trying to register a second domain.

So if you want to register a second domain, the workaround is to go through the 1&1 homepage. In between one of the steps, they will ask if you are a current customer. Click yes there and you will be further provided with an option of including the new domain in the package you already have or in its entirely new package. Choose the latter option.

You can opt for transferring domains to a new ID, but I suppose that only works when you have two IDs with 1&1. It does not work if you just have one ID currently. This basically means that once you register two domains in one package, you are losing five sub domains for good.

Also check out how to configure Feedburner My Brand with 1&1.

Register on 1and1 here.