I gave the [[http://orderedlist.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-tiger-administration/|Wordpress Tiger Administration]] panel a spin today — its fabulous! Its like just another WP plugin, except that it works behind the scenes, giving the administration panel a much needed revamping. Pretty neat, do give it a shot!
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!
Last two nights have been quite frustrating — this website is taking up more time than I intended :(
But its all my fault. No one asked me to upgrade to WordPress “1.6 ALPHA DO NOT USE” version. Its just my itch! Arghh!!! Anyways, somewhere during the upgrade process I broke my permalinks, then [[http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior | UTW]] stopped working, then I tried going back to an older version and that didn’t work either, my database was almost jeopardized.
I almost tore my hair out.
Anyways, things look better now. Permalinks are working (but everytime I write a post or edit a page, they break again — thats just //so lame//). So I’ll watch out for that. Besides that [[http://www.neato.co.nz/ | Christine]] added color support to the tag cloud, so thats pretty neat. Good job Christine! Fortunately Gallery2 and WPG2 have been exceptionally well behaved throughout this mess. And now I’ve vowed not to do an upgrade until the stable version of WordPress and Gallery2 has been announced.
Ok, back to work now
Over the last year or so, I have often felt guilty (the feeling used to come and go) for hosting personal content such as my blog and the photo gallery on my lab machine. Hosting them on the departmental web server wouldn’t have been any different. Besides, nowadays hosting is so cheap and convinient, there really wasn’t any good reason for me to continue //using// school resources in such a manner. I mean, there was nothing //wrong//, strictly speaking, I just didn’t feel very comfortable.
During the move, my machine was down for a few days and this acted as a catalyst — I finally decided to take the plunge. So I got myself a domain name, registered with a hosting service ([[http://powweb.com | PowWeb]]) and setup the blog and gallery there. Of course I moved all of the static content as well.
I’m still tweaking and tuning the website, so let me know if you see something broken. Also, it’ll be great to get some feedback on the response time — if you see things slowing down, let me know and I can bug the folks at PowWeb.
**Why floatingsun.net?** you ask?
Well, __sun__ because that’s what my name means in Hindi. And __floating__ because I think thats how human lives are (see Forrest Gump for more on this) — atleast I’m still floating towards my destiny :-) Finally, I chose the __.net__ domain because I didn’t want to use .com (I’m not a commercial entity) or .org (neither am I an organization). I did get interested in the __.name__ TLD (infact, I also have a domain diwaker.gupta.name registered there, but there are still some pending issues there), but decided that floatingsun.net was simpler, shorter and sounded cooler B-) !
**Floating Sun**
Why is this site called //Floating Sun//? Here’s how the story goes …
Sometime around the summer of 2005, I decided to move my website off of UCSD machines and onto a professional hosting provider. But I had to come up with a good name for my website first. Creative juices were not flowing (as usual), and so I started off with some online tools (sorry, I can’t locate them now) that let you give two or three words and then they would go off and make combinations with those words and related words and show which domain names were still available and so on.
After wasting some time on them, I thought what the hell, let me just pick something from my life. As you know, my name means “sun” in Hindi. Also, I’m not yet “anchored” in my life yet (career wise or family wise). And so I came up with Floating Sun.
As for the choice of the TLD, when I was searching for domain names, the “.name” TLD was just beginning to show up. So I registered for “diwaker.gupta.name” — but it didn’t sound cool and I had some problems with email forwarding and so on. Anyways, so .name was out; .com was obviously out; I didn’t want a .org because I was not an organization. Which left .net; and I thought it might work because eventually this website might grow as a network of my family members. Heh heh.
**Earlier Incarnations**
{{http://floatingsun.net/data/images/forrest-tigris.png?400}}
{{http://floatingsun.net/data/images/iitk-phplm.png?400}}
{{http://floatingsun.net/data/images/iitk-treemenu.png?400}}
{{http://floatingsun.net/data/images/iitk-oldest.png?400}}
This blog is proudly powered by [[http://wordpress.org | WordPress]].
**Legalese**
All content on this website is copyright Diwaker Gupta, unless explicitly stated otherwise. Permission is granted to reproduce the content in parts, with proper attribution to the author. For any other details and clarification, please contact me. For details, see [[http://floatingsun.net/about/legalese]]
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