Pathik Shah

As most of you may already know, starting this month, Google has started sending Google Adsense Payment Checks to Indian publishers using the Bluedart Courier service, at no extra charge, instead of normal post or DHL.

The checks now arrive faster than earlier, in about 40 days from the month when your earnings reach $100.

To track the status of your check, you can use the Bluedart tracking number provided by Google once they issue the checks – normally 25 days after the earnings reach $100.

Get your Tracking Number

- Log in to your Google Adsense account.
- Go to the My Account tab > Payment History
- Click on the Payment Issued – Details link (in the month after your earnings reach $100.)
- Get the Tracking number alongwith the name of the Courier service used to dispatch the check. (In this case, Bluedart).

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Today, I received my first Google Adsense Check via Bluedart. The earnings are for the ads published on PathikShah.Com from December 2008 – March 2009. It isn’t much, but does make ends meet.

When I first started this blog, it was mainly because of 3 reasons -

1. I wanted to be the top search result when anyone googled my name
2. Everyone I knew had a blog
3. I was bored

Unlike most other bloggers, I wasn’t trying to satisfy my creative urge to write, nor did I want to make the world a better place by writing the best tech blog around. . I was just plain bored (I still am), and wanted to do something to keep me occupied (which this blog failed at).

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Google Friend Connect Beta is now out and open for everyone to use. It lets you log in to any Friend Connect – ed site using an existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID. To add it to your blog or site, just follow these simple steps.

1. Just go to http://www.google.com/friendconnect/ and sign in using your Google account.

2. Next, click on ‘Set up a new Site‘, enter the site details.

3. Download the rpc_relay.html and canvas.html files and upload them to your site, and test your site setup.

4. Just go to Members Gadgets, click on Add a Members Gadget and enter the dimensions, the color scheme details and Generate Code.

5. Copy the code and add it to your site either by manually editing your site, or if you use WordPress or Blogger, create a new widget with text / HTML code and add the code to it.

And yea, do join my blog using Friend Connect. Just click Join on the Friend Connect widget on the sidebar.

It’s been one month now since I started blogging. While I haven’t been able to make it as super successful as I expected a month back, a couple of posts have managed to do quite well and I now also rank higher in Google, Live Search and Yahoo.

I have managed to reach the first page in each of them, and hopefully will soon be the first search result on Google — which was perhaps the main reason I started this blog.

Wish me luck in my blogging endeavours. Thank you!

RSS feeds have traditionally been delivered using a RSS reader / browser or using email. But now, you can also send your Blog’s RSS feeds to subscribed users via SMS. This tutorial is specific to Indian users, but you can tweak it to work for your country too.

This will make use of Google’s new SMS Channels features which is free in India.

To use this, you just need to have a working RSS feed on your blog, which is available by default if you are on Blogger or WordPress. To have customized RSS Feeds, use FeedBurner.

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