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?

When someone decides to message you all of a sudden and grumble that you are not blogging, then it is an indication that it has been a while. Well, I know it has, considering the last post was a month back. However, my life is so full of work, that I honestly, don’t have much to blog about.

Anyway, as an update, I have been working long hours all through the week and the concept of weekend is a blur. e.g. I worked till 1.30am on both Thursday and Friday! Weekends that do come along are spent with me resting all day long.

Well, that’s life of an investment banker. I knew the hours would be long, but didn’t expect it to be this long. Normally, this would have been a problem, if I wasn’t enjoying the work so much, I would definitely have hated it!

Talking about investment banking, as of yesterday, I completed two whole months as an investment banker! I know these two months have been simply amazing. The learning curve has been very steep, but I think I’m doing just fine.

What about my plugins, blogging and the rest of the world of IT? Well, it is there. I did put in a few posts at Techtites a while back when I had a full two days. Otherwise, Umar has been doing a good job so far. And, Shahrzaad’s occasional posts have been helpful in keeping the blog alive.

As for the plugins, sadly, they require a dedicated amount of time which hasn’t been a luxury I can afford. However, I have tried my best to support the same in the forums.

I am taking leave at the end of this month, as a break and also to take a trip back home. Hopefully, I should have the time to get in some coding as well!

No, I am not talking about the movie, but just the last 20 days of my life; life that has kept me so busy that you haven’t read about any personal updates.

So, here’s a quick round up of the last two weeks of my life.

The week from 19th to 24th of Jan was like any other week of my life. Spent all of it blogging, reading, eating, talking and sleeping.

23rd was the first and last test of this semester. The test was on Strategic Marketing. We were given a choice between a two simple questions and a case on TESCO. IMO, education should be practical and case based to ensure that people actually apply their minds to everything. A healthy mix of theory and practicals is ideal. However, MBA turned out to be primarily a learn by rote, which is something I simply can’t do. Hence, was forced to understand and write exams where results took a hit. No regrets on that, because I put in my best and did well so far

Aditya, Sneha, Namrata and me decided to go out for dinner on 23rd. After much pondering we went to Haka’s on FC Road, Pune. The food sucked completely and totally. Really felt like I was cheated of my money.

Took the early morning Volvo to Mumbai on 24th to spend the long weekend at home. Met up with Lil white mouse on 24th evening for dinner. I had to get the taste of the horrible Chinese food out of my mouth. So, we headed off to our favorite joint Dynasty. As usual the crab meat soup was delicious. We ordered the Seafood platter and it turned out to be sizzling and not dry, though I would have sworn it was dry the last time I ordered that.

Sunday, the 25th was a quiet day. Lil white mouse came over in the evening to spend some time.

26th is the Republic Day of India and so a public holiday. As a result the roads are usually empty and people stick home. This weekend was different because many had left the city for the long weekend.

I went over to Lil white mouse’s place in the afternoon and we then went shopping to Westside, near Opera House as it was the last day of their sale. Following this, we returned home and then to 5 Spice in Bandra. We were seated at the Non-Smoking, Non-Alcoholic sections of the restaurant, which didn’t make a difference, since it was a dry day.

The service here was a lot slower, possibly because the design of the place is such. The however, remains delicious

I initially planned on returning to Pune on 27th, but postponed that to the next day. Spent 27th at home, working almost all day. Took the earliest Volvo I could to find my way back to Pune.

The last few days has been dinner at Tamanna, dinner at Mezza9, a class and presentation for Strategic Marketing. Looking at my mention of that subject you may tend to think I’ve shifted to Marketing. Well, no, I remain a Finance graduate. That is just one subject

I’ve given Techtites a new look yet again. So, will be spending tonight working on that one.

Live on the Bleeding Edge of WordPress with SVN explains how to keep your WordPress Blog running the latest sub-version build of WordPress. It is highly recommended that you do not use the sub-version builds in a production environment. They are meant for testers.

The optional 2.6.1 release meant that blog administrators had to once again work on upgrading their blog software. I’ve compiled a list of changed files according to trac that you can use to upgrade your 2.6 blog to 2.6.1.

Read more and download

Mark offered me the opportunity to look after the WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5 and I’ve taken it. I’ll be making weekly posts of the same on Weblog Tools Collections as well as on the WordPress Plugin Competition Blog. First post in the series are a few tips for plugin authors seeking an entry into the competition.

Had been meaning to change the entire look for this blog on the January 1st, but well, better late than never!

I’ve changed the template of this blog with a new look from scratch. The old template has been there for well over a year (with modifications), and a change was needed.

I have still retained some portion of the sidebar look as it goes well even with the new theme.

I have disabled a good number of plugins, going with my idea of keeping plugins to the minimum.

All posts now include Tabber which was pointed out to me by Everton.

You can now view the related posts, search this site directly, view the next and previous post as well as read more about the post. I also plan on implementing the 10 previous and next posts, however this is more complicated than I envision. Any suggestions?

Some of the icons you see in the footer and the sidebar are from the extremely famous set by famfamfam.com

There are still a few colors that need changing around here and expect to see a few more developments out here.

I’m gonna take a short break from the designing. Have been sitting for several hours straight!

And if you notice anything broken, please do let me know.

Lastly, how do you rate this design? Do you have any suggestions on improving it?

Update: I seem to have drawn strong criticism about ads on this site! Well, I have actually reduced the number of ads from before. For one, the Performancing ad has gone. Please note that its the ads that help me keep even or I would have to close down
I encourage my regular readers to subscribe to my feeds. The only ad you see there is of TLA, and as of this point, it isn’t really an advertisement!

Also added is autodetecting of Opera Widget. Users in Opera will see a small blue button in their address bar for them to subscribe to the widget to keep track of site updates here.

Looking back at 2006, I think the year went well.

It has been a very healthy year for my blog for sure. I hit into the top 100,000 websites on Alexa and today stand in the top 50,000. Good achievement for a small blog of a small person on the WWW

But, I do have a very very fluctuating rank as you can see in the graph above. I know a lot of users believe that Alexa is flawed, and i think so too, but at the end of the day, its the rank that gets the advertisers!

Site visits have increased as well. I have had 143,143 uniques with 214,533 page-views in 2006 according to Statcounter, currently averaging 440 uniques and 675 pageviews. Nowhere where I would like to be, but definitely better than a year back!

The graph above is my visitors in 2006. The spike you see was because of this post, which hit the front pages of reddit and Digg.

My feed subscriptions have increased as well with an average of a little above 100. Sucks when I compare it to most of the other blogs I read!

Now for the personal front I have nothing much to complain about. After I quit my job I have dedicated a good amount of my time to my studies, websites and personal life (in no particular order).
Unfortunately, the academic portion of my life hasn’t been too good. My future wrt MBA is still insecure and that is the only thing I am worried about right now.

I got a few exams lined up so I hope they work out well.

Once you register for Snap Preview Anywhere^TM you receive a code which you need to add to your template.

Within this code is a key= followed by a 32-character key. e.g. on this blog, the 32-character key is 31f0e1b8935c4f07cb6f1cf99bfb1521.
This key is unique to your site and hence you need to register separately for each of your sites.

Once you get the 32-bit key you will need to enter this into the Options page in WP-Admin.

Being a thorough techie I’m always on the lookout for technology news and updates. Am constantly searching for some good freeware to try out.

But to keep myself up-to-date required me to daily go through almost a hundred websites (and steadily increasing).

This inspired me to start a blog that will get the choicest of technology news all in one central location.

Hence, 30th October 2006 saw the launch of my technology blog titled Techtites.

Why Techtites?

Since the central theme of the blog is technology, for the purpose of SEO I wanted the domain to contain the word “tech”. Unfortunately, almost every technology name I could think of was taken.

Until my astronomy pal suggested the name Techtites, which is a play on the word Tektite.

Any of numerous generally small, rounded, dark brown to green glassy objects that are composed of silicate glass and are thought to have been formed by the impact of a meteorite with the earth’s surface.

Tektites are considered to be of great value and I hope that Techtites will also be of the same value to you.

Today with a new look, I’ve decided to tell the world about it

Do check it out, subscribe to the feed and let me know what you think about it.

And if you have some hot news, you can tip me off.