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Top WordPress Blogs And Upcoming Indian Tech Blogs

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:57:02 +0000

Artur Kim has complied a list of Top Blogs that blog about WordPress based on their Page Rank, Alexa and Technorati Rankings. My blog is at positioned at number 10. I want to thank my readers who have made this possible. Mani karthik has also compiled a list of upcoming Tech Bloggers in India. Here my blog was ranked at Number 1.

This blog has come a long way. While I have slowed down a bit on the posting frequency I will continue to post quality content. If any of you would like to do a guest post here on my blog do let me know what you are going to blog about and use the contact form to contact me.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Wordpress Tags: Marketplace, Open Source, Wordpress

American Apparel Made in India/Pakistan/Sri-Lanka

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:22:42 +0000

I brought a few cool T-shirts from Threadless.com and their competitor DesignByHumans.com. I am a sucker for Unique/Cool looking T-shirts I love designs that are abstract/artistic. I was a bit disappointed with the DesignByHumans.com T-shirt not by the fact that the T-shirt was made in Pakistan (which was a big surprise for me), the T-shirt wasn’t that great and definitely not worth the 20+10$ I spent. The Threadless.com T-shirts were better but nothing I couldn’t buy here except that they were limited edition designs.

What put me off about the Threadless T-shirts were that the labels inside had been snipped off with scissors. Unlike DesignByHumans.com they didn’t want their customers/buyers to know that the T-shirt were most probably manufactured in India/Pakistan/Sri Lanka.

But hey its so UnCool to wear a T-Shirt made in INDIA isnt it?

I remember when my dad brought me a few things when he went on a trip to the US. He got me a pair of Rebook shoes made in China and a windbreaker jacket made in Sri-Lanka all from the USA.

American Apparel buys spun yarns in U.S. but imports organic yarn from Turkey, Pakistan.

Cotton Ginny uses certified organic cotton grown in India; the T-shirts are made in India.

Gap grows and spins its organic cotton in India. Fabric is cut and sewn in Sri Lanka.

Joe Fresh T-shirts are manufactured in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the cotton is sourced in China.

New Organic spins its U.S.-grown organic Pima cotton in Switzerland.

You can read more about it here More here.

Most of the T-shirt made in India come from Tirupur. Its a T-Shirt Fanatic’s heaven, but you’ll need to know the right place to go, also it would be helpful if you knew someone there, its easy to get lost there and its hard to determine the quality of stuff unless you are a fabric expert. There are endless shops piled with T-shirts/Garments of every kind. During my college days I made a trip there after a few of my friends from Tirupur told me how Big Companies like Nike, Reebok were ripping off customers here in India. Apparently the T-Shirts were all manufactured in Tirupur and exported to US/Europe etc, where the labels were snipped off or removed, then exported back to India with a 1000% extra price tag.

Tirupur is the center of Tamil Nadu’s cotton knitwear industry and successfully markets its products in India and overseas. It is called the Knits Capital of India as it caters to famous brands and retailers from all over the world. Nearly every buyer of knitting in the world comes to Tirupur.

Some of the world’s largest retailers including Walmart, Switcher, Diesel, ARMY, Tommy Hilfiger, M&S, FILA, H&M, Pink Lemonade, HTHP, Whale, Reebok, VALUE, PitStop, RESPECT import many textiles items and clothing from Tirupur.

You can read more about Tirupur from the Wikipedia.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Design, Internet Tags: Marketplace, TShirt

Opening A Dirty Can Of Worms

Arpit Jacob — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:54:24 +0000

Today its been weird reading through my RSS Feeds, after reading all these posts surrounding the controversy and mud slinging around the sponsored Themes debate. I’ve been very confused. People in the WordPress Community are not what they seem. I still stand by my opinion that what Matt and Mark Gosh did was the right thing, but some of the posts have been real eye openers. In the end the only thing I can say is to move forward and to forget and forgive. Everyone makes mistakes and we need to learn from our mistakes.

From WPDesigner – Small Potato Is A Douchebag!

The bottom line is the people that are actually helping others without ulterior motives should receive more recognition and rewards, not that they’re asking for it. Second, debates and everyone involved should be more transparent. Third, don’t trust everything you read. Fourth, don’t trust everyone you meet.

Mark Ghosh – Turning The Other Cheek

Unlike Matt, some of the people that have berated me, called me names and disparaged my work, are people that I respect, who were in touch with me frequently and on whom I have spent a lot of time and effort on promotion in the past (and for the record, will continue to promote in the future). The negative responses were not fun to read through but the positives were also very heartening and encouraging.

Let me say that it is very hard for me to turn the other cheek but that is what I choose to do and I will not add fuel to the fire.

Matt – Price Of Freedom

Ultimately I know my software isn’t going to change anyone’s spots. Good people will do good things with it, and bad people will do bad things with it — regardless of any protections I put in place. Windows Vista, a multi-billion dollar enterprise, was cracked within days. Does any piddling encoding I can do in PHP really matter? If protection like that isn’t broken it’s a statement of popularity, not security. I suppose could harass the bad guys, shut down their host, send them scary letters, but it’s just going to stress me out and like cockroaches they’ll pop up someplace else. I also know that most projects, software, and ideas die from obscurity, not piracy.

If I could walk on water, you’d complain I can’t swim

When was the last time someone discussed design? My memory fails me, as far as I remember, people have only overtly exhibited their cheap thrills in pulling others down. Kissing ass is different, doing real work is different. Why should anyone work for free? Which world are we living in? Mark Ghosh, you are either an American or an Indian or both, if I am right? America and India are both capitalistic economies, I don’t think capitalism is bad or evil.

What is bad and needs to be controlled is individual wrong practices and for that, you have no choice but to check each and every theme, no matter how time-consuming and painful the process be. There are no excuses.

Matt takes over http://themes.wordpress.net

So we are not trying to wait it out or anything like that, we are just as sick of it as y’all are so let’s get this thing done and over with. Today will not go down in history as the day WordPress died; in fact it’s the opposite. In my opinion, WordPress is the best open source CMS out there, and can remain that way if we all took the chill pill and got our acts together.

Talking about acts, here’s a confession to add for your weekend gossip, Mark and I have lived a dual life for the past 4 months on WordPress both as designers and as the moderator of themes.wordpress.net, yes we were cleaning out the mess and doing the dirty job while Matt and Mark (Gosh) were busy smearing us with the tar of being the bad guys. But as Matt would thanklessly say, “no one asked us to do it”, we volunteered!

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Marketplace, Opinion

Say Good Bye To Sponsored Themes, Wordpress.com Introduces New Feature

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 02:00:35 +0000

Update: Matt just nuked sponsored themes on the Wordpress Theme Viewers.

Sponsored theme authors had it coming, while I have nothing against sponsored themes, lately the quality of themes being posted on the Wordpress planet have degraded with most of them being sponsored themes. As someone who watches out for good looking theme I am sick of looking at some of the most ugly designs every day. Mark Gosh posted on the Webtoolscollection that they will no longer showcase or blog about Sponsored themes. This is welcome news and a step in the right direction. If only the Wordpress themes Viewer also took the same stand, we could get rid of these sponsored themes and let the quality theme get better exposure.

Wordpress.com rolled out a new feature which is stated to come in the next Wordpress release i.e. 2.3

We have a nice little workflow improvement for those of you who use the Contributor role on your blogs. Contributors can now submit their posts for review by an Editor. When Contributors are done editing their post, they press the “Submit for Review” button to put the post in the Editor’s pending review queue.

This will be useful for multi-author sites or for contributors.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Open Source, Wordpress Tags: Marketplace, Opinion, Templates, Themes