Moving away from self hosting

Well after all these years of self hosting and WordPress I am kind of let go the Self-hosting. Moved pamela.santm.com to Tumblr and all the pictures from Gallery3 to Flickr. 

Still need to move www.santm.com somewhere and aarush.santm,com pictures to somewhere, most likely it will be Flickr again. hope to complete the all these before 2013 finishes.

Google Page Test, CloudFlare and W3 total Cache

Installed all these three on pamela.santm.com and blog.santm.com which are running on wordpress 3.6 trunk. moved the dns details to cloudflare. While Pamela's hobby site did very well Google page test result our blog result was not great. Looks like the culprit is inbuilt gallery of wordpress which is re-sizing images and seving them on fly causing high server time. the command that helped me a lot is "mogrify -strip *.jpg" which is part of imagemagick tool kit and removes exif data from images.

Wordpress 2.6

Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 for both blog.santm.com and pamela.santm.com without any hitch :) Upgraded few plugins as well and so far so good.

Free Theme

I just found out d-atmosphere.com is holding a competition where they are offering a free wordpress theme called WP Remix. It’s a very nice theme with loads of features.

The rule is simple - just write about the competition in your blog and post your link back in the comments on the contest page.

The winner will be announced on March 1st.

Skittlish Theme with Silk Icons for Wordpress

Trying to jazz up skittlish theme of wordpress with silk icon sets from famfamfam.com. In recent time there is new version of skittlish supporting widgets so I thought it might be a god starting ground. Best part - for few colors (red, orange, green & blue) there are icons available for tag, user (author). But for rest there is none. As I am not a graphic person not sure how should I go forward. Any expert out there to help me ;). Plan to release my best by next week.

Wordpress Bleeding 2.2 and TAG

Just upgraded to the latest beta trunk of wordpress 2.2(bleeding) and found myself with unrecoverable errors. Realized wordpress incorporated tagging within the core but the old faithful Ultimate Tag Warrior does not work any more :(
Found another bug-hunt has started and hope for tag import from (UTW) till then …… have to live with out tags Sigh!

Mera Bharat Jawaan

Another funny advertisement which caught my attention Budda Hoga Tera Baap. This is a soft or hard slang depending on your view - "May be your father is old" This new TV series name is "Mera Bharat Jaawan" which translates into "My India is Young". With one fourth population under the age of 25 India definitely has young demography.

Another weekend

Well another day! Some techie note ; upgraded the web site to the latest beta release of Wordpress. And I found some strange behaviour. This is what I put forward to the mailing list. But with few minute of research found the root cause.

New look to web site

Migrated to Wordpress along with Gallery2, the choice for the same was not easy. As for a long time Mambo and custom home grown Photo Album was doing the job fine. In fact the template I used for the same was appreciated by friends. But as days passed and numbers of pictures are growing it was getting difficult to manage the same with custom gallery. But the idea to grab Wordpress and dropping Mambo is a personal one. I will not compare the two. The fact is they two are different and just I felt like blog software will be a better choice for a personal website compared to a CMS

Well there is lots of lots work left to organize the pictures now after this migration as there was no tool or script that I could use to automate the same :(  Hope to finish this by end of September.