Looking back at 2009, I must say that it has been a rather successful year for me on all fronts. While I may not have achieved most of the goals I set for Techtites, it was definitely a lot better than 2008.

I have refrained from setting any goals for this blog, primarily because it serves as a personal blog.

At this time of the year, I normally make a very detailed post about my activities during the year. This year, I’ll refrain from a very detailed post and just make a short and sweet summary.

I began the year knowing that I had a good job in hand. I spent the first three months of the year completing my MBA. I joined the bank in early April and have slogged patiently and diligently over the last nine successful months.

I have also ensured that I continued making regular posts both at this blog and at Techtites during this duration. It’s a hobby that I have ensured that I have not given up, despite the long work hours.

On the coding front, I took over the development of Ajax Edit Comments in March from Ronald. Honestly, I didn’t make much progress on that front and a few months later, Ronald returned to continue the development of the best comment editing plugin for WordPress!

In December, Ajax Edit Comments became a premium plugin available to all users on a paid subscription basis. And, for a limited period you can get the basic subscription for only $10/year.

The downloads of my other plugins have also increased over the last year. I have released several updates to my plugins and my theme. I also plan on quite a few updates on both these fronts. I have had a few themes that I hoped to develop just lying around, so am hoping to finalise and release some of these.

And, lastly, the highlight of year 2009 without doubt was my engagement to Marise.

Looking forward, I hope and pray that 2010 turns out to be an even more successful year than 2009!

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

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!

Marise 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!

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

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?

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

So, why was it called boring. Because, it has been a while since I made a personal post.

This blog sees two types of visitors, viz. those who visit my blog for the personal posts and those who visit my blog for the WordPress related posts, plugins and the theme.

When I started ajaydsouza.com in October 2003, I had only one thing in mind, blogging about my life. In fact, even till today, most of my posts are still filed under Personal.

Over time, things evolved. I got into WordPress plugin development, released my first and only theme and then started blogging professionally. So, little surprise that this blog moved away from the traditional personal blog to a blog that targets multiple audiences, those who read my personal blog posts, those who come for my plugins, those who read my reviews and those who come for the jokes.

And, I try my best to please them all.

So, what determines my blog posts?

It’s always been the life that I lead. When I was in engineering college, a lot of this was visiting restaurants, watching movies and trying to pass engineering.

When I got into work life, it revolved around visiting restaurants, watching movies and working my heart out.

When I got into MBA, I stopped blogging that frequently. This was primarily because MBA life didn’t give me a minute to blog.

In the second year of MBA, life eased out a bit. I was able to take up blogging professionally again. I also revived Techtites, which was dead for nearly a year before that. In fact a lot of my “free” time today is spent on planning posts on it.

Now, in my current day job, it seems a lot similar to MBA life when I didn’t have time to dedicate to my hobbies. However, if you’re tracking me on Facebook, you’ll realize that I do my best to do something besides work.

So, to wrap up this post, here’s what I have been up to recently:

Vincent and me when shopping for a new laptop he needed to buy. We ended up picking up the Gateway ID series laptop.

It is a really beautiful high-end laptop at just about 50K. As for me, I’m a Dell person. This December, my beautiful, but now old, Inspiron 6400 should get a much needed cleanup. I hope Dell support is as good as it was a year back!

We also attempted to visit the Pizza Hut in Forum, but they are under renovation. So, we ate at the Sahib Singh Sultan, which in my opinion is really out of place in a mall like forum. The restaurant was really delightful.

The restaurant is a tribute to a bygone era and everything from the interiors to the culinary experience is reminiscent of a mix of the traditions of Indian royalty and the British Raj.

The restaurant will transport you to the year 1853, when the first Indian train made its run from Bori Bunder to Thane. Much care has been taken to recreate the feeling, with the tastefully done décor, silk tapestry, and exquisite silver ware.

From one end of the wall to the other, there is a Pullman-style carriageway which makes you feel like you’re dining inside an actual train.

On the technical front, I have moved this blog to Media Temple. I’m not sure if this is the best option! In my bid to cut costs, due to limited income, this seems to be a compromise. I also need to work on optimising this blog, which is painfully heavy for some strange reasons. If anybody knows why please do let me know!

Now, it’s time to hit the sack. I begin a new week in a few hours. But, I promise to blog really really soon!

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

This is in fact the first time I?ve ventured out of the safety of Mumbai into the unknown. Two years back when I set out to do my MBA in SCMHRD, Pune, I knew that I had everything planned and fixed with no need to worry about food, clothing or shelter. This time, it?s a question of shelter. So, if any of you reading this in Bangalore, know of a good 1BHK in Koramangala area at reasonable rates, please do drop me an email.

My office is located in Bellandur, so any suggestions regarding where to stay are also welcome.

Another purpose of making this post is regarding support for my WordPress plugins and themes. I?ll be tied down at least for the next two weeks and I?m pretty sure for two weeks after that as I hunt for a place to stay, get accustomed to the new city and job and get all the basic connectivity, which includes a decent internet connection. I do have my Airtel GPRS connection and a Reliance data card, but I hope I get a good signal to ensure I don?t get too frustrated to stay online.

Hence, for the next month, I won?t be able to fully and completely provide the support at the speed I have that I have for so long. Please do post your support requests in the forum. I?ll try to check in once a day or at least once every two days and respond to queries. Sending me an email won?t help. Read why.

So until then, do wish me luck. I?ll try to stay active on Twitter as well as Facebook (at least in the nights).

That’s exactly what I have been up to this past week or so.

New Plugins

So, the past week has seen a new plugin added to my already growing list of plugins. Over, the next week I intend to continue work on the plugins. I plan on scrapping a few ones which have long since served their purpose as well as reworking others. The latest ones could also do with many feature additions. So stay tuned for a few releases

New look for Techtites

I’ve also been working on a brand new look for Techtites. With the help of Moin, I’ve been able to revamp the entire site to a much better template. Have spent a good portion of the week working on the template. The first and major step was making the theme ready for WordPress 2.7 commenting system.

There’s still much to be done, especially the sidebar. Better ad placements has also meant a better click thru and so a wee bit more income.

New Look for Marise’s Blog

I also revamped Marise’s blog. We picked up a new theme. However, it being too narrow for a single column, I spent a good amount of time “expanding” the same for better placements of images etc. I still have to make the theme WordPress 2.7 compatible, with respect to the threaded and paged comments. So, that’s a task I plan on fulfilling over the next few days.

New Look for Weblog Tools Collection

Mark has still not widely proclaimed it, but regular readers would have noticed the brand new theme at Weblog Tools Collection. I’ve been working with him over the past week to convert the XHTML / CSS template into a WordPress theme.

This is indeed rather painful especially if the template and theme are not designed by the same person or in the standard WordPress default theme format.

New look for AjayDSouza.com

If you’re reading this in your feed reader, then take a look at the updated AjayDSouza.com.

I recently stumbled upon Glassy Evolution by iSoftwareReviews and the theme just leapt out of the screen and I decided to use it. Thus ended a long hunt for the perfect theme. Well, sadly, this wasn’t the perfect theme either. For one, the theme doesn’t support WordPress 2.7 threaded and paged comments, so yet again, I went ahead modifying the theme for the same.

I’ve also made changes in the footer, getting rid of an About section. That is still a WIP as you can see. So is the sidebar, which will do well with some of what existed in the old theme.

I’ve added some social bookmarking plugins at the bottom of each post, so please do use them for promoting the posts you like

So, below is the old look and the new look.

I’ve also opened up the option of purchasing 125×125 advertising on this blog. There are currently four advertisements available for purchase at only $50 per month which is excellent considering that this blog is a top 100,000 blog as per Alexa, with over 700 pageviews a day.

Some Personal Life

With me blogging on both Techtites and here, I really haven’t had much of a personal life out of the ordinary. Did watch How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and Outlander.

Dinner and lunch have been out quite often, with Talk About, Tamanna, Andhra Mess and Mudra being the joints that were frequented.

The entire next week is lined up with four assignments to complete, as well as a Finance paper that we’ve been working on for college.

If you’re interested in keeping track of my life, do follow me on Twitter.

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.

As a result, our feed url has changed. The old feed url has been deleted and is currently being redirected. If you are subscribed to my FeedBurner feed, then please update your feed reader.

The URL to subscribe to is http://ajaydsouza.com/feed/. Subscribing to this URL will ensure that any updates at our end will not affect you.

If you prefer to receive feed updates via email then please use the following form:

Infact it wasn’t just this domain, but all domains on my VPS. It wasn’t just comment posting but posting about any form.

It didn’t throw up any errors, though users would get blank pages in firefox, or the Zero Sized Reply error.

Well I tried a lot of things, including upgrading to PHP 5.2.1, disabling eAccelerator, Zend Optimizer etc. but the stupid problem just wouldn’t go away.

At the height of my frustration I asked my host FutureHosting to move to a new freshly installed VPS, which is what we did whole of last night.

I ordered a new VPS and they moved all my domains for me as well as moved the old IPs to the new VPS to ensure that there was no downtime at all and no propagation delays as well.

I’m impressed by their service, because I can be quite a pain at times! Will definitely recommend them if you are looking for a VPS. They have prompt service and great uptime.

I haven’t seen any problems so far, but if you do run across any bugs here or a problem of any kind, especially if you are facing problems commenting, do mail me or try to leave a comment below.

Thanks.

Planet Ajay

I’ve been searching for services that offer this but will confess I’ve been largely unsuccessful. I ran across Feedblendr which aims at establishing just that.

I’ve combined the following feeds:

• Main Blog Feed
• Comments Feed
• Podcast
• Ajay on WordPress
• Support Forum

The new feed is served by Feedburner as usual and I’ve chosen to call it Planet Ajay. It’s also set to auto-discovery, so you’re browser or feed reader can pick it up.

Planet Ajay is perfect for readers who are subscribed to all my feeds. This eliminates the need for you to track several feeds.

I’m still looking for a better option than Feedblendr, because its refresh rate is slow. Do you have any suggestions for a better service?

Bye Bye MBL widget

I’ve also knocked off the MyBlogLog recent visitors widget for my community. I really like the widget, but MBL has become a lot slower than the early days and the widget has been really slowing down the loading of the page.

I may add the widget back in the future, but as of now it is knocked off. I’ve still maintained the code that will display the MBL Avatar next to your comment as that wasn’t too much of a problem (yet).

Suggest

I’m still looking for suggestions to improve visitor experience on the site. I’ve cut down on images to speed up the site, made more feeds available and have also ensured your comments count!

What is it that you find missing out here?
Do you have any suggestions for improvement? What can I do to make your visit here more memorable (in the good way) and what do I do to keep you coming back?

Waiting to hear your comments.