What I've been doing ...

I've been doing a few useful things:

Learning about "Google Analytics" a sophisticated tool to find out about what's going on, on your website. We are using it to track IndiaWaterPortal. There's a whole science to track web traffic out there, going by the extent of detail there is on Google Analytics. Just one example -- they give you 'bounce off' figures that show at which page people left your website and went elsewhere, which I suppose is to give you an idea of what pages are putting people off for whatever reason. I hope the Water Portal gets a lot of hits.

I downloaded an automatic link checker software. This is something that can go through your complete website and test all the links to see if there are any broken links. Its very useful for a site like ours. There are several tools out there which you can find with a google search, I downloaded one called Xenu which worked quite well for my simple requirements.

I and another person at work resolved a very frustrating problem we were having with our internet connectivity. This was a real achievement in terms of the effect on the productivity of the office. That in itself earned my salary for atleast a couple of weeks, I would say.

I am putting a job posting on Monster.com for another person to work on the Portal.

I went to Tumkur, a couple of hours from Bangalore to meet a NGO that we work with, though the trip wasn't very fruitful.

I had lunch with Krishna Rupangunta, at eGov who do the technical stuff for the Water Portal website. Dear anonymous -- Krishna is your batchmate at IIM Calcutta, I think his nickname was Madde or something then.

I went to Cat's brother's wedding in Bangalore (Cat is a classmate from IITM). It was good. May was there, Cat's wife, and we met his parents and so on. They (parents and Cat) had come to my wedding which was very nice of them.

I went to Vinod John's marriage today, a classmate from IITM. I have a nice photo of the happy couple which I hesitate to upload as a possible invasion of privacy.

I have been working on formal fellowship applications probably to be given to Asha for Mutyalappa (yes the same one I talked about earlier) and Sireesha, another interesting person at Timbaktu. I will (of course!) put them on the blog when I'm done with them. Its quite a time consuming task but its interesting and somewhat creative work, and if the fellowships come through it will be a tremendous satisfaction for having been able to affect some peoples' lives in a potentially very valuable way.

Looking at the above, I'm a little surprised how busy it makes me look, for what has actually seemed like a frustrating and unproductive couple of weeks :-).