My main innovation with Kottu was Wordpress and I guess the color red. Both are now gone now, leaving only ideas. Kottu is now truly designed by the younger, faster and better Janith Leanage, and it is good.

I read HeyDude’s blog now and then, he tells some quite good stories. This is a classic about moving to another country, not having much money and loving your kid. I know a bit how it feels: “This story is not funny at all. We hadn’t brought much cash with us when we arrived here. And everything was unexpectedly, artificially and humorously expensive. What we had we had to spend so carefully till we got our first month’s salaries. The little one who had a roomful of toys at home (both his and his sister’s) was fingering the toys in the shops here and but never asked for them. We gritted our teeth and prayed for the salary.”

Kottu now has tags. THANKS TO JANITH. Boy is a genius, seriously. I work in duct tape and he works in marble. There’s a thin line between categories and chaos, but I think Kottu is walking it now. Basically, bloggers can tag posts as they please. Kottu takes the first three tags, sese if they fit into our taxonomy and files them accordingly. What I think is especially cool is that language and popularity and category filters all work together. Thus, you can get a vegetarian kottu with extra chili but no onions, so to speak.

Janith has set up tags (or categories) on Kottu. Announced on Twitter. We’ve thought about this and I think he’s implemented it in a good way. Too many tags are worse than no tags at all, so there’s going to be a set amount. Hashtags, whatever, come and go. But there will be a few set categories. If bloggers categorize their posts, we can pull that from the feed. Check it out at kottu.org/tags.php.

Sanjana Hattotuwa has got a personal beef with me, but he’s hiding behind Groundviews and the CPA. Sanjana, if you have something to say, why don’t you say it to my face? I’m here, I’m under my name and I try to be as honest and transparent as I can. You don’t need to hide behind Groundviews or your NGO, just be yourself. If you’re going to make personal attacks, the least you can do is be a person.

I support Milinda for Mayor. So does my dad. The Samarajiva cat is undeclared. Sanjana Hattotuwa seems to think that is a big conspiracy. It’s not. It’s literally all over the Interwebs. Sanjana is technically astute and he pays his respects to the point before he buries it. He says “the web platform is, by far, the most innovative I’ve seen for a candidate and the policy document, as a foundation for something that can be built on, is hard to fault.”

Janith has released the secret recipe for Kottu. It’s MSG. Little bit of cocaine. Alternately, it’s a bunch of php files now stored on GitHub. The whole thing is released under the Affero GPL (as per Chanux’s suggestion). This means the code is free as in speech. Do something cool with it if you can.

I suppose I should put a question mark after that title. How many women are blogging in Sinhala or Tamil? The Women and Media Collective is holding a meeting on September 9th for the same. They’re also conducting research on the potential of women bloggers. There certainly is a lot of potential, and if you are a woman blogger, I hope you’ll attend.

Sri Lanka is frequently broken down into Sinhala and Tamil (or Sinhala vs. Tamil), but the country is actually a lot more diverse. There is a huge and largely multilingual Muslim population, but even that doesn’t do people justice. There are also Malays, mostly Muslim but diverse in their own way. Here are two posts on the subject.

Kottu has been completely recoded by Janith Leanage. What’s different? Well, it got too big and now Kottu has tools to make the experience a bit more relevant again. You can filter by language on top (English, Sinhala, Tamil). The popular posts thing is now back, except smarter. Before a few people would sit and click all day and mess up the rankings. Now clicks are only one factor in an algorithm, other factors are buzz on Twitter, FB, Twitter and Google Plus.