Tagged: blogging

Slow nooooo!


For the first time I experienced inexplicable slowness in my website. And I mean terrible, //terrible// slowness. The databases weren’t responsive, PHP was slow. FTP was working fine though. Probably something wrong with the PowWeb servers, need to check up the forums.

Some changes — updated gallery2 to beta4, and so WPG2 as well. Also installed wp-cache to alleviate some of the performance issues. The old pages should definitely load faster.

If you experience slowness with this blog in particular, do let me know!

Call for logos


Hailing all artists out there. I’m looking for a nice logo for this website, so get your creative juices flowing!

Terms and conditions:
* only PNG or SVG format accepted
* you **will not** get paid in any form whatsoever. You will, however, enjoy my gratitude :-)
* the logo should reflect the spirit and theme of the site (don’t know what the hell those are though!)
* any number of resubmissions allowed without penalty

Email your entries to blogger.at.floatingsun.net !!

Tagged


I think the whole concept is silly, but what the hell (blame [[http://nakulmandan.blogspot.com/ | Nakul]]). I have seen a slighly different version on [[http://abhaga.blogspot.com/ | Abhaga's]] blog, so I’ll merge the two:

* Three names I go by
– Diwaker
– DG
– Walker
* Three screen names you //have// had
– diwakergupta (Yahoo!)
– diwakerg (AIM)
– 107813177 (ICQ)
* Three screen names I would like to have: I don’t like using names that only serve to hide my identity. Why does everyone keep trying to be someone they are not? But if its just for the coolness factor, then lets say
– [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_Root | EnochRoot]]
– [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_Simpson | BartSimpson]]
– TheBatman :)
* Three things I don’t like about myself
– Bad at suspending disbelief (gotcha, didn’t I?!!)
– speed at which I gain weight
– shy away from high risks
* Three things I like about myself
– good with technology
– fast learner
– shy away from high risks :-D
* Three parts of your (meaning //mine// I suppose?) heritage
– respect work, don’t rely on luck
– honesty
– modesty
* Three things that scare me
– lizards
– fear of dying a lonely man
– confined spaces
* Three of my everyday essentials
– a computer
– internet
– cell phone
* Three things I badly want to do before I die
– social service
– start a company
– go to space
* Three careers I’m considering
– industrial research
– technology evangelist
– something exotic, like an expert on volcanoes or something :)
* Three places I want to go
– Egypt
– Rome
– Venice
* Two thruths and a lie (in no particular order)
– This statement is false
– I’m telling the truth
– None of the above are true

Alright enough already!!

Is your blog licensed?


[[http://bloglines.com/ | Bloglines]] calls itself “the most comprehensive, integrated service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich Web content. ” However, its not a non-profit organization. They _do_ have a business plan. AFAIK, they plan to use data mining on the content of blogs they crawl, and then use that to display relevant ads to their subscribers, much in the manner of [[http://google.com/ | Google's]] [[http://adwords.google.com/ | Adwords]].

And so you might write an innocuos post about say [[http://www.hbo.com/city/ | Sex and the City]] and a subscriber might end up seeing an ad for a porn site next to your post! There are some [[http://trademark.blog.us/blog/2005/01/20.html#a1536 | interesting]] [[http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/this_weblog/the_perils_of_syndication.html | articles]] out there talking about the issues that can arise if you don’t pay attention to how your blog’s content is licensed.

Be aware! Protect your blog with an appropriate license so that services like Bloglines don’t abuse your content to make money.

The best blog?


A recent Slashdot story [[http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm|talked about a comparison]] between the various blogging systems out there. The author has conducted a fairly thorough breakdown in terms of features, licensing, cost etc. Until some time back, [[http://movabletype.org/|MovableType]] used to be the de-facto platform for personal bloggers. However, due to a recent change in their licensing policy, people have stared looking at other options.

Personally, I’m quite happy with my choice of WordPress. Apart from the fact that its open source, matches feature to feature with MovableType, has a flourishing online support community, extensible plugin architecture and active development, atleast for me, the win in favor of WordPress comes from the fact that it comes as a Debian package. Though I consider myself to be a power user, and have no inhibitions with hacking compiling my own stuff, atleast for my server machine I prefer stable prepackaged binaries. Especially if you’re working with Debian, there’s nothing better than an apt-gettable package. Go WordPress!