Last Week
The last 10 days have been a fair tech disaster for me….. the site was down from the 2nd till the 9th because my previous hosting service got attacked by something while moving servers. The fact that they hadn’t informed me ( i am not sure of their other customers) about the move, and possible downtime – was exacerbated by complete and utter ineptitude while dealing with the crisis. I dealt with 7 different people over the 7 day period – each of whom was vaguer than the previous one….. And each of them responded, because of a mail from me … not because, they as service providers wanted to keep a customer in the loop…..This is a classic case study on customer mismanagement. I can understand and empathise with technical problems, I can’t with customer mismanagement. It is forgetting basics in business…

Finally when they restored the site…. there wasn’t even a message saying service restored. Therefore, I did what any paying  customer would do ….. changed the service provider.  When the site finally came back up…  i changed nameservers, moved host……..and was out before you could say blog……

Now

Moved to  a web hosting service provider called hostican.com. 200 GB space, 2000 GB bandwidth and great customer support (the last two days have been blissful in terms of restoring my site) — all for around Rs.2000 per annum. Hope that I don’t have to move for the next few years.

Am going to be doing up my new home over the next couple of days…..

I have finally upgraded my blog -

this is now running on

• WP 2.3
• The theme is 1st Zaxioma 1.03 by Zaki
• plugins include
  • FCKEditor
  • WP Flickr Post Bar
  • Subscribe Me
  • Comment Quicktags
  • Akismet

• Assorted widgets include
  • Feedburner Widget
  • Flickr Badge Widgtet
  • Google Search Widget

If you have any other plugin’s / widgets to recommend – please go ahead

Have finally overcome severe inertia to upgrade the site … to a new version of word press etal

This follows hot on the heels of me upgrading my machine at home….. am still finding my way around the new system …. personalizing it etal….

if the blog disappears for ever in the process of the upgrades…… it was nice knowing you……..:)

My earlier hosting service, the excellent Weblleyou is in the process of winding down their service.

And there i was, happily settled into my home – and had to move all over again. Given that in my childhood i moved 8 homes by the time I was in the 10th – i have this great aversion to moving – whether it is in the real world or the virtual one. Thankfully, the people who have taken over my hosting, The Host Group , provide an equally good service, and moving was relatively stress free. I may have gritted my teeth a couple of times over the weekend when the site was in limbo land between name servers — but then i am not really known for my patience.

In my trawling through the net for content of interest, here are a few new ones that are really interesting.

1. Atrocity News – a site dedicated to highlighting atrocities in India. The site is a meticulous documentation of cases that violate the fundamental rights to life, liberty, property and equality. Its’ progress report on Khairlangi is detailed and up to date.
2. At Home, Writing – a blog that looks at literature. Erudite, informative and well researched, it acts as an effective pointer to the written word.
3. Passion for Cinema – a collablog which loves its movies – good, bad, ugly, and the utterly kitschy. with little tit bits of behind the scene action, and a hit or two or rumour/spoliers – the site offers a smoragsboard of views, experiences and insights.
4. Cool Bihari – a blogsite that looks at development and good news from Bihar as opposed to the death and drudgery.
5. Indian Muslims – a collablog that discusses ‘issues concerning Indian Muslims’ – interesting.

These new blogs are in addition to the evergrowing list on my bloglines subscription. With the coming in of blog aggregators like Desi Pundit and Blogbharati – excellent sites – my level of involement in looking for new blogs to read has actually diminished – they do that work for me. But, sometimes -just sometimes– i miss the old blogmelas that used to happen – which gave a different sort of ‘jhalak’ every single week of blogsites & bloggers – very often based on the hosts own set of interests. Does anyone else miss the blogmelas or am i just having a bad day with nostalgia?