mere funde

I should have known better!!

When I became the webmaster for the ISB Student’s Blog, the first thing I did was install the WordPress DB Backup plugin. I also tested it then, and it worked. So I assumed all was fine.

Anyway, last month our hosting ran out due to non-payment of fees, and the email alerts went out to people who are no more at ISB anymore. Since the account was not renewed the hosting was canceled. It was during the exam times in Term 4 and not many noticed.

I wasn’t too worried since I thought I had a backup and would be able to get the blog back up from it and running in no time. But lo and behold, the backup plugin did not work anymore and the scheduled backup did not work. Now we face a daunting USD 150 in renewing and restoring the old setup

Learnings from the incident:

• Take regular manual backups, and do not depend on plugins for that.
• When using a hosting account, ensure that the registration is done via a mailing list which includes people responsible for maintaining the hosting, and the blog, and update it every time people leave.

The blog has undergone a major change, and it is more functional than cosmetic.

I have realized that I don’t have time or patience to write longer posts given the time, and hence starting on this P2 theme. It feels more like Twitter, and I hope I am able to post more often

Upgraded to WordPress 2.6.2 and also updated the Twitter Tool plugin.

By the way, the WordPress 2.7 has auto upgrade from within the admin area. Now that is a nice step ahead, and also a logical progression of the plugin updater. Also, that means that the cPanel becomes almost useless for me. I would also have wished for an integrated backup otion.

After dragging my feet on it for ages now, I finally got around creating an IP Blog Search engine using the Google Custom Search. You can access the search engine here.

I got the list of blogs for the search engine here.

The blog now runs WordPress 2.6 and I will be in Hyderabad over the weekend and plan to have a lot of fun

.. discovered by total chance. Check it out here. A sample of creativity below.

If you are one of those three (lemme count.. one, two, three, yup, thats all) people who do visit my blog and read tolerate the nonsense that I put up here, you would have noticed that the blog was out for a couple of days. Here is an official reason.

I had not been able to post in hindi for quite some while now, and I had done nothing wrong apparently. However, on deeper inspection, I did find out the reason for this. The database, provided by my kind host, used the latin_swedish_ci character set and collation. Because of this it did not support the hindi fonts. So I tried rectifying it by running some basic SQL queries (which is not saying much). So I backed up my database (important), and started fiddling around, and obviously everything went wrong.

So I had to go back to Ashish and ask him to setup a database with the UTF8 charset which supports the hindi character set. After he did that, I setup WordPress (2.3.3) and imported the posts, comments, images, themes, etc. Only one glitch remains. Due to an error in WordPress, the tags have been imported as IDs into the new database. I have applied the patch mentioned in the forum [I am so proud of being able to do that!!], but haven’t been able to reimport the tags as of now. Will keep you updated as and when that happens. Till then,

आपको हुई असुविधा के लिए मुझे खेद है

It was on Jan 31st, 2005 that I started writing this blog. Since then a lot has happened. I have moved from a wordpress.com blog to a self-hosted one. I have written more than 300 posts. There have been around 10k hits on my older blog and around 2k on this one.

However, I have still not been able to post in Hindi on the new blog. I want to spend some time redesigning it, but haven’t got around to doing that.

But the more important thing is that I have kept going. And I think that the thing that keeps me going is that I think I would want to come back later, and read about how I have felt over time. I am too lazy to write a diary, and I think this is much better and easier option. Here’s to many more to come. Cheers!

PS: If you do check my archives, you will also see a lot of posts dated before Jan 2005, but those are posts from our, i.e. STAR-PLUS,  older group blog at “East of Omaha“.

I imported all posts and comments from our old group blog today. The blog has now been dormant for more than a year, the last post being one on the Hyderabad trip. I just wanted to back it up for the future. The blog posts contain a lot of trip reviews, nice little conversations, lot of debates, and some awesome memories. The blog itself was the brain child of Ankit and it slowly transformed into a group blog. It was pretty damn active while I was still at BITS and Rahul doing his PS. And then after that it lost steam.

Anyways, due to the Twitter plugin, the import resulted in a couple of friends being totally spammed. I am so sorry folks. Never meant to.

Note to self – Before any importing or exporting or updates or anything else, deactivate all plugins!!

As the last tech job on the blog for this year, I have upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2!!

Looking forward to 2008.