My Insights

If you can see this post then the nameserver change has successfully propagated to your DNS.

The primary motivator for the move was storage space. I was paying 4.95/month with Ace-Host for 5GB of storage. I have now moved to Web Hosting Pad for 5.95/month and now have 1700GB (1.7TB) of storage!

 Since I was spending the day moving my site, I decided to upgrade my bloggin platform from MovableType 3 to MovableType 4. However, after a few internet searches in an effort to re-evaluate my faith in MovableType, I started to like Word Press much more. The major reason I decided to switch from Movable Type to Word Press was the sheer number of plugins and themes available for WordPress as opposed to MovableType.

 Anyways, I am confident that I made the right decisions regarding my web host and my blogging platform. Comments are welcome.

If you didn’t notice that I have a new banner on my website, then you need to visit my site more often (including you RSS readers). It was created using paint.NET which is nothing less than Photoshop as far as I am concerned … and it’s free!

It started development at Washington State University as an undergraduate senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing. (source)

Although the banner above might not say much for my artistic skills, it should definitely tell you that an amateur like me can easily generate professional quality images using paint.NET.

It was created using the following picture (taken by my brother in NY) on a layer which was made semi-transparent.

By the way, the fact that my banner is professional quality is not a matter for debate.

So what are you waiting for? Ditch that illegal copy of Photoshop on your PC and download paint.NET!

Interesting tidbit - Last month, the third highest search string that brought people to my website was “xbox 360 399.99″. Just shows how far this craze has gone. Anyways, I always check out the search strings because I find it all very interesting. Check em out yourself:

Those of you who didn’t notice, shame on you. But for your benefit, I had Google AdSense ads on the top of my website and incorporated in the search feature of my website. Well, I think I must’ve had them up for about 2 weeks and all i made was $1.33! Because of you guys who didn’t click on these ads, I decided that it was not worth having these ads on my website. So, I took em off. It just looks nicer without them somehow.

I made a little update to the ALL BLOGS script. Apparantly I heard complaints of it being slow and sometimes it didn’t even show up!

Now, as it is working its way through the various websites, it’ll give you a little status update on what it is doing now. I hope nobody minds! Actually I think the tech junkies might actually like the feature. As always, I am open to suggestions.

For all of you who have been patient with me, I THANK YOU. For you guys, here it is again - Automatically Sorted ALL BLOGS!

I made time zone adjustments because everybody publishes their feeds in a different time zone (tell me about it!) So if you see an instance where a certain blog is not ‘in place’ then let me know, It’s probably a time zone adjustment error.

If you go to http://www.pranavsharma.com/allblogs and it still tries to redirect you to the OLD ALL BLOGS then clear your cache. To do so, do either one of the following:

1) When it says “Redirecting you to the OLD ALLBLOGS in 2 seconds …”, quickly hit F5 to refresh the page. (OR)
2) In Internet Explorer, click Tools>Internet Options…, click on Clear History.

Ambar and Mohit’s blogs are the only ones that are not publishing feeds. I have requested them to activate that feature but until then, their blogs have been manually pushed to the bottom.

Once again, keep in mind that it does take about 2-3 seconds to Access all the blogs and to calculate which one goes where. So be patient once you click on the link.

I also made the individual frames a little bigger - Width went from 97% to 100% and the height went from 500px to 600px. Any feedback on these settings will be seriously considered and quickly implemented (because it’s so darn easy haha).

Well, If you guys had visisted my site in the past week, you’d have had seen how much of a mess it had turned into. It happened because my click-happy fingers deleted the entire contents of pranavsharma.com.

All that was left was the surface crust - the individual pages in which each entry was stored. I was working for the past week on restoring this website. I was surprised to find out that there existed morons as dumb as me out there and fortunately there was some support on how to go about restoring my data.

Also, the pictures section is up and has 9 NEW albums which are worth checking out: http://www.pranavsharma.com/pictures. Now that I have a digital camera, expect a whole lot of pictures in that section of this website.

It’s 3 in the AM and I am exhausted. I have a lot of stuff to write but will do that later in the week. For now, just a status update.

PS: By the way, if you guys see ANYTHING wrong, just shoot me an email (contactpranav(at)hotmail.com) or post a comment. Since most of the restoration was done manually, it is hard to do it perfectly. Any extra lines or format problems or ANYTHING, just let me know. Thanks in advance