April First came and went with its set of jokes and hoaxes. Thankfully, I didn’t succumb to any, but for a few from our very own Google! Yeah right, Google too released its set of April Fool Hoaxes very promptly, this year! If you didn’t know, Google has a history of April Fool hoaxes in the past including very inventive stuff like Google Gulp (A fictitious energy drink) to Google TiSP (a toilet-linked broadband service!)

So, the very inventive jokes by Google this time are:

1. CADIE or “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity” was the first in the long list of gags. Users of Google books and GMail found this queer announcement on March 31st. That day, the Google homepage said this:
   

   “For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.”

   LOL, ain’t it? Here’s the link to CADIE. And guess what, CADIE even has an official blog, on which page, Google shows an error. Here’s an image which shows how the blog looked like.

2. Almost all other hoaxes, including this one on YouTube, were based on CADIE. YouTube had a very hilarious ‘new viewing experience’ page, which actually inverted videos!! Take a look at this to see a featured video by the user ‘CADIE’.
3. GMail gets a new ‘autopilot’ option‘ with which, one could ‘adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings.’ It even has a ‘relationship ender’ which sends messages like ‘Terminate relationship’ as response to relationship related messages – says the FAQ page
4. GBall powered by CADIE comes next in the line. Exclusively for users from Australia, is said to be a ball for the Australia Football league in prototype. Whoa! And its technically engineered too!!
   
5. Even  Google analytics wasn’t spared. Here’s an analytics report of CADIE’s activities!!
6. There was even a 3D edition of Google chrome – running with the power of CADIE. Here’s how it looks!
   
7. Then came Google’s brain search, reminiscent of the old MentalPlex hoax. Same logic, but works only with mobile phones. You have to hold your mobile phone to your brain so as to ‘search the brain’. And you’re not supposed to search others without permission!! Try it… it’s damn funny! This is a sample result!!
8. Then there was Picasa with auto red eye… LMAO!!

WordPress is an awesome content management platform! It’s easy, dynamic, customizable and user-friendly – especially for bloggers most of who aren’t familiar with the nuances of PHP, HTML/CSS, Javascript and other ingredients for web publishing. More and more people are realizing the power of this dynamic content management platform and are yearning to move over from other platforms like Blogger/Typepad/Livejournal et al. But some of them stop in the mid-way, bogged down by technical issues. Even I had the same fears about importing my Blogger blog to wordpress. But once done, I realized that it was just a piece of cake.

But I too had to face my set of problems. Here are a few tips for all of you who badly wanna embrace WordPress. (Remember, I’m talking about the custom content management system available at WordPress.org, not the free blog at WordPress.com)

Here I go!

1) Install your wordpress blog correctly – First, buy your domain and get some good quality hosting space. 100 Megabytes is more than enough for a good wordpress blog. Make sure your hosting package includes a MySQL server, since, only then can you install wordpress. You can find detailed instructions on how to install wordpress here. Edit the sample post and add your stuff

2) Import your wordpress blog - In the ‘Tools’ section of your wordpress dashboard, there’s an option called ‘Import’. Select it and you’ll see a host of options, including ‘Blogger’ on the top. Choose it, and follow the instructions. However, there is a possiblity that you might encounter a problem. In such a case, make a WordPress.com blog and import your blogger blog into it. Then export it into an XML File (Dashboard – Tools – Import) and log back into your domain and import all posts. Voila!

3) Maintaining Permalinks: Now, this is going to be an issue you will face. If you’ve used a domain in your blogger blog, your old users won’t get redirected to your wordpress blog, because the permalink structure is different. But again, you can change it by changing the format of your wordpress permalinks to /%year%/%month%/%postname%.html. This feature is available at the Settings tab of the wordpress dashboard.

All this takes just 10 minutes!

Happy Blogging!