Night Dreaming (by Sudar)

Continuing with my digital disasters my site also went down and do you I didn’t had a backup. Yes I still have to learn the lesson.

It also thought me another lesson, not to buy hosting from a cheap re-seller. Actually I brought the original account from a re-seller in eBay and I was happy for about a month but after that the company disappeared overnight. To add salt to the wound I didn’t had a backup for my blog also.

After that I bought another account from a reliable (?) hosting company and again took the pain to import the whole blog from blogger, like how I did it a month ago. But this time the new import option available in WordPress 2.0 was of real help (more on that for another day)

I was struck up with another problem after I imported. I only had posts which I wrote before I shifted to WordPress. Thanks to Google Cache and Bloglines I was able to retrieve the posts which I wrote after I moved to WordPress and then I retrieved the comments from the email that were send by WordPress. So I was able to bring back my blog to the original state before it went down.

Thanks every one for the bearing with me during the downtime and for the support shown and wish you all a happy 2006.

Self Note: So two more resolutions for New Year
1) Don’t buy hosting account from a cheap re-seller
2) Do take BACKUP of important stuff.

Tags: backup, Blogger, WordPress

At last, I have finished shifting my blog from Blogger to my own domain which is running wordPress. It has been in my to-do list for quite a few months, may be from the day Fred shifted his blog to his own domain

You can find the new blog at http://SudarMuthu.com/blog/ and if you have subscribed to the RSS feed the feed url (http://feeds.feedburner.com/SudarBlogs) remains the same.

Shifting all the posts with comments from Blogger has been a little pain since Blogger doesn’t provide a direct export option. But thanks to the import script written by Andy Skelton and the explanation given by catsutorials. It really saved a lot of time for me. If I find time I will write a small explanation with screenshots to help people who want to use this script.

WordPress has been really excellent so far and has satisfied all my requirements. You get tons of themes and plug-ins. And the credit goes to the community. Right now I am playing with lot of themes and may be even this theme may change in a few days.

So guys welcome to the new version of my blog and do let me know your comments and suggestions

Tags: Blogger, WordPress

Improbulus wrote in her blog that Google is conducting a survey for users of Blogger. And I went to my dashboard and followed the link to give up my feedback. There were some questions like how long have been using blogger, how frequently you have been using it etc.

After that they asked for the features that I want to be implemented in Blogger. I thought posting my answer here so that we can discuss about the different features.

So here is my list of features that I want in Blogger (in no particular order)

• Reduce Spam
• Better support for editing posts.
• Support for classifying posts into different Categories.
• Trackback support.
• RSS Feed for comments.
• Blogger tags for displaying the total number of comments and trackbacks.
• Ability to keep track of the comments that I have posted in other Blogger blogs (you can list the comments that I have made in my dashboard).
• Email notification of other peoples comments on blogs in which I have commented.
• Ability to add an ‘about me’ page.
• Custom Index page (the first page that comes up when we type the blog url).

So guys what you say? If you feel that I have missed out some, leave me a comment I will add it up here.

It seems that one of my feature requests is answered. Google has released a Blogger for Word toolbar. I have just downloaded it and it works great. This post is posted from my Microsoft Word itself

Tags: Blogger, Improbulus

Most of you would have noticed that there are many changes in my blog. Yesterday I got some free time and I used it to make some changes to my blog, which was in my TODO list for long time.

First I changed my Blogger template to Thisaway Blue by Dan Rubin to make it look more colorful. Thanks Dan.

Then I have stated to add Technorati tags to my posts. I am using a greasemonkey userscript for this and is quite handy.

The most important of all, I have added Trackback support to my blog through Haloscan. Improbulus has an excellent article, which explains how to do this.

Again you people could have noticed some new links in my blog, like Bookmark in Del.icio.us or Furl link and “Subscribe via email” from Bloglet. Again Improbulus has an article which tells you how to add this in you blog.

If you have a blog in Blogger and want to enhance it, then I strongly recommend you to visit Improbulus blog. She really has lot of hacks for Blogger including multi-lingual support.

The feature which I still miss out in Blogger is the ability to group my blog entries according to their post category. I searched for it but couldn’t get any solution. So let’s hope Blogger implements it soon.

Tags: Blogger, Blogging