Tag: Blog

Blogs, Blogosphere, Blogocube etc.

On throughput, quality and quantity of blog posts

Sohaib Athar

It has been 10 months since I started this blog. At 50 posts, its about a post a week (a post per weekend is what I aim for in fact) – not a lot by any standards but who cares.

I have estimated that I have spend around 20 minutes on writing an average sized post, out of which, half the time is spent on rereading and correcting spelling, grammatical and structural mistakes in an attempt to make it more coherent. In a brief moment of insight (2 minutes ago), I have decided to do away with those extra 10 minutes, which should double the quantity (though perhaps decreasing the quality, but I can live with that) of posts. This means no more using arrow keys and copy/cut/pastes after I am done writing – I will still use the arrow keys to insert new words where they belong, but no more rereading and editing. I feel liberated already.

B(ack)log Links – Part One

Sohaib Athar

I just took a look at my 'FOR BLOG' bookmarks folder and was amazed to see the number of pages (66) I have bookmarked during August, with the intention to write about them here, but never got the chance. So, in an attempt to cross that task from my TODO list, I'm posting some of them here (minus the planned commentary/discussion/blogging) and deleting the rest. They should have converted into 66 posts, but oh well!

I need a break from all the copy/pasting now, and will have to split this post in two parts. So these are the things that have been using up my brain cycles this month. If you find any of the above things useful/fun/entertaining/offensive, do leave a comment so that I can justify spending the last hour or so on this.

Moving hosting to Linux

Sohaib Athar

I’ve had enough of webhost4life and Windows hosting, and will be moving to a (borrowed) Linux based server today. The move will change the DNS, so the blog may be inaccessible for a day or so.
I’ll leave this subdomain running for a while, but I’m expecting the URLs to get prettier (no more /index.php/), so check https://reallyvirtual.com tomorrow to update your feed/bookmarks etc.

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Switching from Community Server to WordPress

ReallyVirtual2 Comments

The last time I started blogging, I chose Telligent’s .TEXT (later renamed to Community Server) after some research on the options available. It was the sensible choice at that time because

1- It used the (then hot) .NET with SQL Server, which I was playing with.
2- It was Open Source.
3- I had a feeling the community will contribute and extend the functionality through its (pretty good) plugin-based architecture.
4- Though I did not need its forums, the photogallery was really powerful.

The post (one of the few I managed to post) about my installation experience, and enabling anonymous comments did help out a couple of people so I feel less guilty about not continuing to blog.

Fast forward a couple of years… I am restarting blogging and searching for the latest version of community server and it turns out they are not “serving the community” anymore and have gone commercial. Yes they do still have a “free” license, but no its restricted features no longer suit or attract me. So I have to either stick to the older version, install the new version with all the restrictions, or switch to another blogging system.

As you can see, I chose the last option and switched to WordPress, after another two hours of research to see what has been happening in the blogosphere while I was away. I feel sorry for the people who can’t switch due to lack of web applications deployment knowledge (drop me a message if you need help), and I am glad to see about 2 million results in Google for “community server” vs. 12 millionish for WordPress. One more win for the REAL opensource!

I use a free redirection service from www.mydomain.com which points www.reallyvirtual.com domain to the rv.cypherone.com subdomain, this way I can use my existing hosting for the blog, until I find a reason to get a dedicated hosting space (1000+ readers ought to be a good reason 🙂 ). My hosting provider is webhost4life.com, which has real human (and fast) support and had the best value for money that I could find at that time.
Now webhost4life has a decent set of ready-to-install plugins (WordPress included), which I immediately set up using their single click install, only to find out it was an older version (2.0).
The WordPress upgrade documentation page made upgrade sound like a painless process, but after upgrading, I somehow ended up with only my homepage displaying, with all other links giving a 404. Back to Google I went… at first I thought that WordPress in getting confused by the base URI (www.reallyvirtual.com) and the redirection, but found out later that since the server is windows based, so a combination of mod_rewrite and .htaccess unavailability, if you try to use custom (pretty) permalinks, could do this. *SIGH*

I decided to start with a clean slate, and after a few minutes of tinkering around, finally found the php.ini solution to WordPress permalinks error that works for me. Thanks Taragana 🙂

After installation from scratch, tweaking the basic settings, creating categories for topics that I plan to write about, and being impressed with the range of plugins available (Community Server doesn’t even come close here), I can now safely say WordPress is the best choice at this point in time. The only thing I still need is a photogallery to go with it. If you have any recommendations, do let me know.