Tag: blogs

WordPress and Blogging

Prasad Ajinkya1 Comment

image 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 :)

Amateur blogger

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

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 :-)

I am the walrus

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

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

The Dead blog

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

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

Start-ups and Upstarts

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

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.

The Unusual activity

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

I clocked roughly 200 blog posts last year. That’s a post every alternate day. Impressive no? The feat was particularly possible because of my previous employment. I ruled the IT Infrastructure there (which was in addition to my actual role). The good things about being ‘God’ (read admin), are that the laws don’t apply to you. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Start of the new year, I got an opportunity with a Mumbai based tech startup. Hours are long, pay is decent, I am home sweet home. Rosy picture aint it? Well for now it sure is. The catch is, no net access, especially Gmail, so no blogging L and no chatting. Thank heavens for Twitter!! Hopefully the email api of blogger still works.