As part of my work, I am also maintaining the corporate blog these days. Sadly, the content management system (CMS) on which the blog is based on is kinda out of date. So much so that it has become virtually impossible to recreate the same environment on my own desktop.

What this means as a software person, I have to make changes and edits on a production platform. Not only does this give me the heeby jeebies, but also it makes the task a bit too tedious. Any one who has worked on an online server knows the PITA (pain-in-the-ass) it is to edit code files online.

Over the past week, I have been trying to handle this mammoth. I so miss my own agile and flexible WP 3.04 platform!!

In fact typing this blog has made me de-stress

One of the great things about working with legacy CMS is that you get to (or rather have to) understand the exact workings of the CMS, you suddenly start seeing a plethora of possibilities and that gives you a sense of fulfillment.

Came across Google Webfonts, decided to try it out on this blog.

Instructions are pretty simple, as long as you are using CSS on your site. Otherwise you will be forced to CSSify your site first before implementing Google’s webfonts.

Include the Google Font definition in your head section, and simply update the “font-family” attribute in your body CSS definition to the desired font family.

Pretty simple and elegant. Trust Google to come up with this.

Back in August 2006, I had written a post on Dot Com Bust 2.0 (you can read it at the link provided, sadly rediff BLOGS has a bad way of storing posts (week-wise instead of it being individual posts).

Revisiting that post was an interesting exercise, an excerpt -

Do we see history repeating itself? A sudden surge in this Dot Com 2.0 demand, people are already teeming in to cash-in on this new opportunity. Do I start off a firm of my own and try to do the same. Is this risk / venture enough to sustain me through the impending bust? During my induction at TechMahindra, there was a fellow from the top management who was wizened enough to predict that the next bust is going to come in the year 2009. We laughed it off back then, I am not laughing now. Maybe, the dot com bust might relapse, and why not? Fortunately, IT in India is not just about web development anymore. We will pass through this. But will my dream of starting off on my own do the same?

Full marks and respect for that top executive.

In case you are wondering why the reduced frequency in posts, that’s because I have taken up part time blogging at a site which I have frequented and grown to love over the past couple of years. It is Crazy Engineers.

You can read the rest of the announcement here.

Guess I will have to plan my time better so that both the blogs are not neglected.

Created or rather tweaked my first WordPress theme ever. Have taken the Magazine theme and with the help of Angad worked out a flashy new theme for our latest blog at work.

Interesting to note that many people do only this for a living and some of the themes fetching a whopping $200 per piece. Makes me want to learn WordPress as an engine and contribute (eh … loosely using the term here!) to the WP community.

See the series of blogs under this theme shortly here and here.

It’s a thought experiment that I would want to share with you all -

1. Divide the blog’s content into content which I want to share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc
2. Tag the posts accordingly
3. Create separate feeds for each tag
4. Sync the right feeds with the right media

That way, intended audiences could be targeted and on different spaces. All through a single blog

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