Career Steps: How to tell the world what I am ?

I could not wait for long time to write this post, continuing what I had started in my previous post Career Steps: Tell what "you" are to the world?
many might be already thinking of implementing/doing few of the mentioned points. But how you do it makes you really different, isn't it!

• Register into relevant/interesting groups/forums & be a watchdog there.
• Actively take part in the technical talks/sessions.
• Try to excel in particular concept and be ready to show your capability. (When u r ready, opportunities sure to come!)
• Keep shouting/discussing at community groups/forums.
• Be attentive and ready to extend your hands to the people with doubts.
• Show you professionalism.
• Start socializing.
• Maintain your personal pages/blogs/websites.

These are just few of the ways that I can immediately think of and I welcome all to suggest more ways if they have any...

Well here comes the action items:
Rails Groups & Forums: (For ruby enthusiasts)
http://www.ruby-forum.com/
http://railsforum.com/
http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-on-rails-programming-with-passion
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails
http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=46323518
http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=1198032
http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=188
http://groups.google.com/group/bangalorerug


Professional Network:
http://workingwithrails.com/ (for ror professional)
http://www.linkedin.com
http://www.ecademy.com

Social Networks
http://www.facebook.com
http://www.orkut.com

Personal Page:
http://www.blogger.com
http://www.wordpress.com
http://pages.google.com/
http://myspace.com

Online Knowledge Base:
http://www.scribd.com
http://www.slideshare.net
http://www.slide.com

Bookmarking sites:
www.stumbleupon.com
www.digg.com
www.delicious.com
http://del.icio.us/

Career Steps: Tell what "you" are to the world

I was wondering when thousands of people are obtaining similar (professional) degrees, and developing more or less same skill sets,

• How one I be picked as best from the rest ?
• How can I show that I am different from the rest?
• How can I make it to the top cream?
• How do I know where am I standing in the skill/domain...?
  
• How do I show my expertise?
• ...
• ...
• ...

Well this how we should start thinking whenever we are about to apply for any job or looking to grow high in the career path.

Websites -> Weblogs -> Micro Blogging -> ? what next?

I was just recollecting how the internet had changed the people, business, culture, thought process and the list can go on and on... But I am just amazed the ways and means of showcasing, marketing one about their skillset, work capabilites and portrait themselves to this wide world.
Websites:
where you pile up lots and loads of content in form of pages and users/visitors can go through leisurely.

Weblogs (Blogs) :
Later moved to weblogs, popularly known as blogs, for more interactive, updated content.

Micro-blogging:
We are now even ahead of blogs with micro-blogging concept. Users can post limited text about what they are doing?

What caught my attention is how dynamically we are becoming and more dynamically we are able to develop the software tools that can keep up our dynamism, agility, communication, information gathering. So also the market coping up with new trends, millions of websites, later came the revolution through blogs (wordpress, typepad, blogger...) and now the micro-blogging popularised by twitter, jaiku. This micro-blogging became so famous that it influenced well established web applications/products to embed this feature into their own systems.

I observed them in the following places:
LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, Digg...

So what next after this micro-blogging?
Are we heading to "nano"???

Scaling of Twitter - What's the truth ?

Twitter, there might be very few web browsers who does not know about twitter. For the benefit of those few, Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates.
Twitter used to go down due to the page views load. There is been lot of discussions, questions regarding the scalability of the Twitter. And I too faced many people asking the scalability, capability of the Ruby on Rails (technology with which twitter was built) in building the web applications.

Twitter started as a side project and blew up fast, going from 0 to millions of page views within a few terrifying months. Early design decisions that worked well in the small melted under the crush of new users chirping tweets to all their friends. Web darling Ruby on Rails was fingered early for the scaling problems, but Blaine Cook, Twitter's lead architect, held Ruby blameless:

For us, it’s really about scaling horizontally - to that end, Rails and Ruby haven’t been stumbling blocks, compared to any other language or framework. The performance boosts associated with a “faster” language would give us a 10-20% improvement, but thanks to architectural changes that Ruby and Rails happily accommodated, Twitter is 10000% faster than it was in January.

Hope that clears some air around twitter discussions. Interestingly, there are quite a number of applications that are build around twitter gaining popularity.
twittervision, summize (twitter search) to name few.
Twitter was made very handy with lots useful tools/extensions on every platform that you can think of. From desktop to iphone users, the gadgets are available here.
I too tweet here!
Few slides that comes handy when you want to speak/read, how the scaling of twitter is getting improved.
View/Download From Slideshare.
Scaling-twitter by Blaine
Scaling-twitter @ railsconf-2007

Internet Technology Bubble :)

Firefox Extensions - Set as Startup Page(s)

A quick fix for this extension. The latest version will have the options set in context menu(i.e, on mouse right click) and under Tools menu options. The button from the status bar is removed now.
Thanks to Prashant for his feedback and I will implement the suggestions in future releases.

Download Extension
We browse umpteen number of sites/pages across the internet everyday. If you like them and you want to keep the selection as startup pages for your browser (FF), you have to change the options manually.

I thought (as most users feel!) it was not convenient and so I ventured to make it as simple extension. Well if you are like me then, "Set as StartUp Pages" is one such simple and profound extension which would let you set the startup pages with a simple button click from your status bar.

How it works?

1. Install the extension.

2. Restart the browser instance.

3. You will find a button "Set Homepage(s)" in statusbar.

Correction:
Button from status bar removed.
Options are visible in Tools menu and context menubar.

4. Browse across pages in as many tabs you want.

5. Click the button to set them as startup pages.

6. An alert message would confirm the above step.

7. Clicking on 'Home' icon, you can see the implementation.


Set As Startup Page(s) - Download

For next release:

1. Option to set the pages just on mouse right click.

2. Help page with instructions.

3. To improvise the alert/confirmation message.


Note: I would like to get your feedback before I submit to Mozilla Add-ons repository.

Set As Startup Page(s) - Download