Posts Tagged migration

A new year, a new blogging tool

By now, you’ve probably noticed that the appearance of this blog has changed dramatically and, I hope, for the better. It has a cleaner look, utilises the available screen space more effectively, and is generally more pleasing to the eye. So, the question is, why change something that wasn’t broken?

Blogger is an impressive publishing platform that provides a lot of features right out of the box. Besides boasting of RSS and Atom feeds, comment moderation, scheduled publishing, superb integration with other Google services, availability of a large number of themes, the ability to GUI-edit and, if needed, hand-edit, the layout, posting through email / mobile, availability of desktop publishing tools like Live Writer, and numerous other features, it’s also quite popular and has the backing of the respectable Google brand name behind it. All this, however, failed to satisfy the craving for the ultimate level of control that I, as a programmer, had; the level of control that allows you to change just about anything on the blog.

Enter WordPress. For long, I did not really take the effort because I was busy with work and / or other commitments. (That’s actually a fancy way of saying I was too lazy to get off my backside.) However, when the New Year holidays lurked around the corner, I made up my mind to make the switch to WordPress, no matter what it took. It also helped that I had recently moved to a better web host, one who did not litter my pages with advertisements. The discovery of a free service called Everydns gave me even more freedom and control. And thus it was that I laboured yesterday and the better part of today to finally make the shift.

Now, it’s up to you people to tell me what was better – the Blogger blog (which, incidentally, is still alive) – or this one. Please feel free to speak your mind in the comments section below.

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Fly away

Leaving one’s country always causes, I suppose, mixed emotions. On one hand, I’m sad that I’m leaving the shores of the country that I’ve always called home, though I’ve not been proud about it at times (that happens to most citizens all over the world, I guess). I’ll definitely miss the sight of familiar faces and places. On the other hand, I’m looking forward to what I think will be a new life for me, a new beginning, a fresh start. A fresh start implies getting rid of one’s past baggage (to a reasonable extent, the extent being entirely subjective and personal), and that can not only be unnerving at times, but also painfully difficult. Yet, this is what I feel I must do, and this is what I’ll strive to do, if I have to have any chance of reviving my sagging career, my not-so-inspiring life. My personal credo can do with some updates, the old patterns of thought and behaviour being contradictory, sometimes, to my core beliefs. Knowing that never fails to make me squirm, and I hope I can successfully get rid of those mental cobwebs.

Who knows, as a result of those changes that I’ll work on, this blog might even get a bit more interesting to read!

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