Who? Me??

Last year, I was vacillating between WP and Blogger as my blogging platform. You can see some of that here. With WP 2.7 coming out, I was tempted to try WordPress, finally this year I made the shift completely. As promised, here are my experiences with WP on my own hosting solution + domain.

You can also try this out on your <name>.wordpress.com blogs as well, but the real awesomeness comes out only with your own domain and hosting combination. Try it … it costs around Rs. 3000 odd, but definitely worth it!!

How to do it

Transferring from one platform to another was pretty simply. WP comes in with a very nifty import facility, wherein I could import all my Blogger posts with their comments (whew!). Then it was just a matter of changing the domain settings (this took more than a day to figure out!!).

Pros

The pros are the obvious ones -

1. Completely customizable look and feel of the blog
2. Readymade and re-usable themes and cool widgets that simply fit into your blog
3. Hassle-free
4. All plug-ins, widgets, themes and the platform itself auto-updates!! I don’t have to do any tinkering around
5. Huge, and I mean one mother of a huge community to contribute to this WP ecosystem

I could go on, but lets leave these for now. I like the platform but it does have its peeves.

Cons

1. Categories and Tags … Tags and Categories … yeah, now I have to decide on one and do both … even if just one morphology works for me … anyone have a hack for this?
2. Now I have noticed that I keep on playing around with the platform more instead of writing more!!

Any help from you guys would be appreciated

I have decided to put some spare time into writing a small CAT blog. For aspirants and other people to share their experiences. Hopefully friends and classmates will contribute to it, so that by the end of this year – it will be ready for the new batch. To read, learn and gain inspiration from.

Here’s the link, check it out.

I have decided to use my fledgling blogging talents (ahem!?! or so to speak ) for making some money. There are quite a few blogs out there which pay good money for guest bloggers to write posts for them. Rs. 500 to Rs. 1000 per post. It doesn’t pay as much as our normal job does, but imagine – you can earn this money without any qualification as such!!

Another style of earning money would be google ads. So please do not be pissed if you see those on my blog in some days. Heres to turning a cost center into a revenue center

Got tagged by Sudhir, so here goes. Umm, sorry for responding kinda late

Instructions read: Using only song *titles* from one artist, cleverly answer these questions

Pick a band/artist: The Beatles

1. Are you a male or female: This Boy
2. Describe yourself: I’m the Walrus
3. How do you feel about yourself: Free as a bird
4. Describe your ex boyfriend/girlfriend: Glad All Over
5. Describe your current boy/girl situation: Hallelujah, I love her so
6. Describe your current location: Nowhere Man
7. Describe where you want to be: Strawberry Fields forever
8. Your favorite color is: For you Blue
9. You know that: All things must pass / We can work it out
10. What’s the weather like: Rain
11. If your life was a television show what would it be called: With a Little Help from my friends
12. What is life to you: That means a lot
13. What is the best advice you have to give: Act Naturally
14. If you could change your name what would you change it to: Doctor Robert

I tag – Amit, Baba, Ankit, Ashish, Abhishek

Ok. So I haven’t been active lately here. Mea culpa. There were some personal crises that had cropped up, the details of which I will divulge over the next row of posts. Of course I can always give the standard alibi that is floating around – Recession hain bhaiyya!

Enough of that though, not one more word (well some might crop up here and there). Here is what you can expect to follow on the blog -

1. Marriage (as seen by my significant other) – the editing will of course be done by moi
2. The jhols and some bitching against a few corporates
3. Other gyaan that I may feel free to impart from time to time

A co-blogger and an expert in start-ups, Sushrut has written an excellent post on reasons why one should join a start-up and what are the pitfalls one should look out for before joining a start-up.

The reason why I am re-iterating this point is simply because many start-ups demand the kind of dedication from their employees that is not needed and certainly not justified … all in the name of it being a start-up. Tum mujhe khoon do, main tumhe ESOPs dunga seems to be their mantra. While this works out for people who know exactly what are they signing up for, it comes out as a shell shocker for those who join the band wagon expecting a different culture altogether.

It’s the culture that could be a defining moment for the start-up. I am not dishing out gyaan here. It is true … the culture of an organization can go a long way between success and failure.

No, its not about collaborative marriage over the web . Amol gave me this crazy idea. We were discussing the Indian SMS site, Vakow which enables us to push normal SMS into a web-based RSS/Atom feed. There are about a gazillion applications for an RSS feed. Well, this is just one such mashup between a practical application of Vakow and Google Reader.

Well to be honest, the title of the blog should not be Shaadi 2.0, but rather Event 2.0, but since we are using the my marriage as the event to cover, I decided to name the title so, well ..  and this one is more exciting na? So here is what we did.

1. Register on Vakow, get a username and have your phone number associated with that username, so that you can SMS messages to your Vakow id.
2. You are on track now, and you should be able to post a feed … now that your feed is set, we just need to integrate that feed with my marriage feed
3. Send me the RSS link, I will add it in my Google Reader public folder, and voila!! You can view the sample page here.

People who cannot attend the wedding in person can keep on hitting the RSS page for an up-to-date status.

Got tagged by Archana, I know this tag is going to make me do a lot of introspection; much needed at that. Tags spread through viral referrals, and I hope that this one spreads out … through me and through my friends (you are going to be tagged!!).

The tag:

Two questions in each category answer them and then tag your friends from the blog-o-sphere. Leave a comment on their blog letting them know they have been tagged and you are all set.

Then:

Your oldest memories

• Getting spanked on my derriere by the nurse … ohhh the blood rushing to my head … for crying out loud!! (he he .. was just kidding )
• Throwing toys down the 9^th floor and watching them disappear as they fell fell fell … from my grandparents flat in Churchgate when I was a toddler
• The glee when I saw my first horse at the age of 6
• The achievement I felt when my aunt taught me to draw a horse shortly afterwards … I was addicted to horses after watching the movie Betaab … had seen the movie 3 times in one night!! … for the horse … no I dont mean Amrita Singh
• Seeing my first computer at the age of 9, it was a 80386 and my mothers brother had forked out one lakh for that machine … shucks … so much for Moore’s Law. Played Prince of Persia for an hour, I was thrilled … decided then and there that I would be a computer engineer )
• Owning a XT 8086 with a monochrome display and 640KB of RAM, the machine did not have a hard drive, and I was happy
• Feeling the pride when my Maths teacher called my parents to commend my papers and explain the empty class notebooks in my 4^th standard
• Feeling an even greater humiliation when I finished last in class during the mid-terms of 9^th standard … cable TV is a great evil
• My first ship cruise to Goa … fresh fish and a choppy sea
• Standing atop a spiked gate and then the horror I felt when I saw that my new cream chappals had turn blood red … weirdly I do not remember feeling any pain

What were you doing ten years ago?

November 1998, I was a first year engineering student, the first semester was coming to an end; and I was fast learning that I am loving engineering more and more since it does not adhere to the sad mugging pattern of school. I remember going to college, attending tuition, bartering notes, copying assignments, discussing over the phone, the long bus rides along the beach. My engineering college was Fr. Conceicao Rodriguez College of Engineering … it is on bandstand, Bandra and generally a very nice place to hangout if you get over the engineering studies . I was having a rocking time.

Now:

Your first thought in the morning

I should not have stayed up late in the night to finish Brisingr.

If you build a time capsule what would it contain?

Hmmm … good question. It would contain nothing; the present is to be lived … enjoyed … why give the future excess baggage to dig up. (pun intended)

Will Be:

This year…

I intend to get married to the love of my life, possibly shift jobs and find a way of means to be near my loved ones. Activities such as blogging, web dev, tweeting, et al are bound to happen!!

What do you see yourself doing 14 years from now?

Why the no. 14?? Well … I would be attending PTA meetings … and planning my retirement as well. Archana, are you up for co-authoring that book?

I tag:

Amol

Sudhir

Amit

Ashish

End of the tag