It’s my birthday today! With that, I edge just one year away from three-tenths of a century.

And, as a gift to met, I’ve spent a good portion of the night working on a new theme for this blog, one which was long pending.

After a lot of searching I came across Paperpunch Theme by The Theme Foundry which I fell in love with almost instantly.

Paperpunch is a clean and easy to use theme, yet comes packed with some decent free features. You can upgrade to the Pro version which makes life a lot easier!

My plugin Add to Footer definitely made life a bit easier, since I didn’t need to add in a lot of code for my analytics.
However, the theme required a good amount of modification to capture my header and sidebar, pages, comments and other features that I have maintained across themes across several years. Not to forget the ads that help sustain this blog.

Lastly, SexyBookmarks WordPress Plugin does deserve a major mention for it is extremely feature rich and with minimal interference allows you to share content of this blog with your friends through the most popular social networking sites. You are recommending these posts, aren’t you?

I’ve also included a neat little array of buttons at the top of each post, you can quickly share our posts on Facebook and Google Plus.

Until next time… do keep reading and do comment below and tell me if you like this new theme. If not, what can I do to improve it?

And, have you hit the like button at the bottom of this post to add Ajay – On the Road called Life to your Facebook favourites?

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all my visitors. May you have a great year ahead.

And, here’s a treat to know what the story of Christmas would have been like if we had Facebook 2010+ years back!

It was about time… I have finally created a Facebook page for this blog. Up until now my profile has been one of the promotion media for the blog. Now, I hope to increase the number of persons following this blog via Facebook.

If you have been reading this blog, do hit the like button on the Facebook page.

I still can’t create a specific username for the page. I believe it is just a matter of time before I can do so. If you have become a fan of this page, do comment below and let me know.

I am using RSS Graffiti to add posts from this blog on Facebook. Extremely powerful and definitely an alternative to Facebook’s Notes application (especially since it doesn’t work too well)

I’ve been using Flickr Photo Album on this blog for a long long time now, maybe well over a few years. However, in a bid to reduce memory usage at this blog and to also utilise my unused domain AjayDSouza.info, I decided to move the location for my photos.

In fact, until August last year, AjayDSouza.info served as a secondary location for displaying my photos. It was powered by a script that fetched my albums from Flickr. However, I wasn’t too pleased by the script and so didn’t bother to promote the site.

I decided to hunt for a new script today and came across Glickr. Glickr is an extremely easy to use, smal, but very powerful script for displaying photos from Flickr.

AjayDSouza.info will now serve as the primary location for display of my photos. With a little .htaccess magic, I have redirected all existing links on this blog to the site. Please let me know if you notice any malfunctions / broken links.

I plan on working on the stylesheet and theme but that will be at a far later date. Until enjoy my photos.

The last month reminds me of 2007 when I just entered SCMHRD as a budding MBA student. Life was totally crazy then since I just didn’t have the time to blog or even check my email.

That is something that I have been feeling off late. Well, blame it on my exhausting job. In my line of work, the only thing that keeps us going is the level of enjoyment we have at work. Otherwise, I am sure I wouldn’t have survived! On the work front, I’ve been working non-stop on a good number of weekends!

Lil white mouse came down last month, so I finally got to spend sometime with her. Though, I must confess that I am one of the most boring hosts ever.

The only two places we really went visiting was Star Bazaar, to pick up much needed supplies, that would last us over the weekend. We also dropped in at one of her friend’s place for dinner.

I had an extra day off in which I tried really hard to complete a new version of Better Search. However, I wasn’t very successful, since I had to scrap much of the changes.

I also realised that the feature rich Media Temple wasn’t the best solution for this blog. I’m really surprised at the kind of resources this consumes, but I almost shot way over the 1,000 GPU cycles. Had to move my blog out of there in a hurry. By my estimates, I would have easily had to pay $20-30 more.

So, I finally took the plunge into a VPS yet again. This time I decided to give ServInt (aff.) a shot, since it had a really good plan.

Spent a good portion of the week after that optimising the server. Am pleased with the results so far. I’ll make a post on Techtites sometime soon on basic optimisation tactics.

On the fun angle, to bid farewell to one of our colleagues, we went off to Purple Haze on Friday. It’s a nice pub in Koramangala. It was a good break after the crazy work life.

And, in another six days, I’ll be in Mumbai!

If you’re reading this in your feed reader, then hit this link now.

I mentioned earlier that I moved this blog to Media Temple yesterday. However, on monitoring the same, I have realized that I am still not at optimum levels. I’m not really sure what the reason for the super high resource usage is, but it is usually the themes and the plugins. So, as a test, I have decided to change the theme in an attempt to find a really light one.

One of my most read blogs is Weblog Tools Collection, and in a recent post, I stumbled upon Swift. This is a three column theme from Sadish. Sadish has known to churn out really good themes and I decided to use Swift.

As you can see, it still needs a crazy amount of work. For starters, the header needs to be fixed, as does the footer. I still need to replicate some of my old menu system. However, most of all I’m going to monitor the load on the server to see if switching the theme actually helped!

As usual, I’m throwing open this post to suggestions from you. I’m looking to improve this theme. What would you like to see?

A little more than a month back I moved this blog as well as all my other sites to my new account at Blue Host. This was the first step in cutting costs (and no it is not because of the recession).

Since then I stumbled upon Super Green Hosting and as part of my plan of spreading out my sites, I took an account there as well and today, at long last, have completed moving this blog to the new server.

If you are reading this post, then it means that the move has been completed for you.

That being said, I believe everything should work just as fine now, as earlier, but please be on the lookout for bugs or problems on the site and contact me if you find any.

Update: My email wasn’t working since I forgot to change the MX entries. This should be fixed now!

Imagine my shock, surprise and excitement to find out that my review of Slumdog Millionaire was featured in Mumbai Mirror’s Bloggers’ Park.

Here’s a softcopy of the article as it appeared in the newspaper.

Mumbai Mirror is a newspaper focused for Mumbai that comes along with The Times of India.

Though, I must say that I didn’t see much traffic coming out here because of the article, I am pleased that my review was considered newspaper worthy

Thank you Mumbai Mirror! And, thanks to @rahuljrark of Cool Tricks N Tips for pointing this out to me.

This blog is now running WordPress 2.7. I performed a complete delete of this blog and then imported all the posts, comments etc. Read how you can start afresh with WordPress 2.7.

This site has retained this template for a long long time now. Well, it’s time for a change and I’m keen to do so asap.

And, who best to ask that all my loyal readers. So, what would you like to see. What color combination would you prefer? A dark font on light background or a light font on dark background?

What about colors? Greys, blues, greens or…?

Do you have any themes in mind that I may use as a base?

What features would you like to see on this blog?

Am open to all kinds of suggestions. So please keep them coming. I hope to get the changes in place over the course of the next month.