Category — About me

After being dormant for the better part of last year, I hope to make a new beginning on this blog. Maybe not daily updates, but definitely fairly regular updates.

The theme refresh is a part of this new beginning. I’m now using Neoclassical by Chris Pearson.

Let the good times begin…

Update: And now I’ve also upgraded to WordPress 2.6. If you’re running a self-hosted WordPress blog, please upgrade to version 2.6.

The new Blogger is out of Beta. Defying “conventional” Web 2.0 “wisdom” of a perpetual Beta, the new version of Blogger has been formally launched.
When I read this news, I decided to migrate my Blogger account over to the new version. So I logged in to Blogger with my old username and password, expecting to see a link on my Dashboard giving me the option to migrate. If Blogger was out of Beta, it obviously meant that they had worked out all the kinks around migration of old Blogger accounts over to the new version. And since they could not force-migrate blogs automatically without the bloggers’ knowledge, they would provide means to migrate optionally.

But I was surprised to find no such link/button on the Dashboard. Hmmm… that’s strange, I thought. So I logged off and went to Blogger homepage. There was a button on the generic Blogger homepage that gave the option to switch. So I clicked it and initiated the migration process.

After a minute or two of “in progress” status, it flashed a very generic message stating that an error had occurred that prevented the migration from completing successfully. And that their engineers would look into the problem. There was absolutely no inkling about what the error might’ve been. Just a generic message asking me to look out for a link to migrate that would appear on my Dashboard sometime in the future. In short, the message did not tell me what the problem was and neither did it give me any idea about when the issue might be resolved. That’s a poor poor user experience!

And not just poor user experience. It also shows that issues relating to migration of old blogs have not been addressed fully. And yet, Blogger chose to come out of Beta and launch formally.

All this sounds frighteningly similar to the Microsoft approach of releasing half-baked software full of un-helpful and thoroughly confusing error messages! Personally… I am not concerned that I was not able to migrate over to the new version of Blogger… because my primary blog is right here and it uses WordPress (God bless WordPress!). But looks like in its efforts to compete with Microsoft for the web OS space, Google is hurtling towards becoming a Microsoft clone in all the wrong ways!

It’s new theme time, here at The Opti Mystic!!

I have gone in for Subtle, from Glued Ideas because I like the soft pastel colours and the rounded edges. It has a certain Web 2.0 feel to it. Me like! :)

It’ll be a while before I can get it tweaked to fully personalize it with custom headers et al. Also, it’ll need some work to get all the plugins I use, to start working the way I want with this theme. Hmmm… I wonder if I can get Lightbox to work with it too! That means… the look and feel will be work-in-progress for a few days on this blog. And in that sense, this blog will be in “Beta”!! … now that’s Web 2.0 most definitely!! ;-)

I don’t like the idea of someone being forced to eulogize a ‘national symbol’ to prove one’s patriotism. I want to ask the people who are doing this, to embrace a tiger to prove that they are proud Indians!

At the same time, those who are trying to bracket patriotism alongwith religion should also take a hike.

Sing Vande Mataram if you want to… no compulsions!

But surely you should have no reservations about One-Day Mataram, my cricket blog!! :D

Announcing the resumption of play at One-Day Mataram after a gap of nearly three years, no less!! And considering that I had started ‘One-Day Mataram’ in January 2003, it is perhaps one of the oldest Indian cricket blogs!

I’ve posted on One-Day Mataram about the reasons behind starting that blog and the reason for resuming it now.

But I love to write about cricket. This does not arise from any great, in-depth, researched knowledge of the game. It’s just that having followed the game for so many years with enthusiasm, I have opinions. And what is blogging if not a way to voice those opinions! ;-)

With the 2007 cricket World Cup approaching and a fairly packed itinerary for the Indian cricket team, I thought I should revive One-Day Mataram. And given that today, i.e. September 7 2006, is significant from the point of view of Vande Mataram and that with so much controversy surrounding it, I thought this would be the perfect time to start singing like a canary on One-Day Mataram! ;-)

While I will continue to write about cricket on this blog too, One-Day Mataram will be exclusively devoted to cricket.

And I can’t promise that there won’t be any idol-worship on ‘One-Day Mataram’!! ;-)

Announcing the re-launch of ‘Parallax‘, my photo gallery, in a new and improved avatar.

Parallax is powered by a powerful upcoming photo gallery solution called zenphoto. The reason I chose zenphoto was because of its philosophy, ‘simpler is better‘. It is unencumbered by the feature-bloat afflicting most of the current gallery softwares. The clean look is fresh and it offers an admin interface that resemblance the simplicity of WordPress admin. Moreover, a plugin called ZenPress provides easy integration of zenphoto with WordPress.

Coppermine, based on a cumbersome phpBB was great and I used it for my old gallery for over two years. But the presence of features, in my opinion, not essential for a personal photo gallery makes it too heavy and difficult to modify and maintain. That’s why I have decided to make the shift to zenphoto. The old gallery will be online, in parallel, for a short time after which it will be switched off completely. I apologize that the comments you have left on the old gallery over the last two years will be lost. But I wanted to start afresh.

Do give Parallax a whirl and let me know what you think.