Nisadas

As I may have pointed out before, the consistent feature of this blog has been upgrades to WordPress and its plugins.

Rarely have I taken the time to actually add anything of note to this blog.

Beginning May 2005, Nisadas was launched from home on my dial-up connection and featured a mashed up theme that borrowed (stole?) heavily from various existing themes that I thought were interesting.

Prabhath, the design guru at the up-and-coming contender for Best Sri Lankan Web Design Firm (Vesess) saw it, puzzled over it and then kindly advised me to use a more interesting theme like Blix.

After that, I managed to squeeze in a few posts such as;

• Small is beautiful
• Multum in parvo
• Identity crisis
• The Horton Place Progressive Front (possibly one of my better posts)
• Quis custodiet ipso custodes? (which combined my penchant for latin headings with my interest in Pratchett)
• The Magic of books (the Kindle wasn’t out yet)
• Life on the silver screen (my first movie review and the first time I went for a premiere. It was weird sharing the theater with so many sri lankan actors, ‘cos I didn’t know any of their names – just their faces )
• and my most viewed post – HSBC (SL) doesn’t want me to use Linux

After that, most of my posts came few and far between, with random surges whenever I got some free time (which was spent mostly fiddling with the themes and plugins).

During all this time, I’d been hosting at NearlyFreeSpeech.net which I have to say is the best bet for anyone looking to start out hosting their own domain for their blog. Then came a special offer from Dreamhost which sounded pretty good  so as of January 4, 2009 Nisadas found a set of new nameservers. Within a few days though, the server this was hosted went down. It was back up again and I’m sure apart from a few spambots, no one else apart from me noticed. Which is ok – I’ll give DH a go and see how it fares. If it doesn’t impress me, I’ll be back at NFSN.

Installing WordPress 2.7 and getting the fabulous Amazing Grace theme working (after getting it off NFSN) was a breeze. I’m quite impressed by the ease of exporting the blog using the settings. Also, WordPress 2.7 looks even better than before. Very Web 2.0 so to speak (I remember the older 1.5 UI). The facility to upgrade from within the blog comes quite in handy, especially since I’m not much of a hacker anymore.

So my goal for 2009 is quite simple – at least one post a week, for a total of 52 in 2009. Let’s see how that goes.

I’d ask you to put your seatbelts on, but this is going to be more like a ride on a bullock cart, so no worries, y’all

Technically, time is supposed to fly when you’re having fun. However, it also flies when you least want it to. The question that lingers most in my mind is whether the days really are shorter than when I was younger, or whether it’s just the change in perspectives. Most definitely time flies when you’ve been given a deadline and a ton of stuff to do.

The cliche is that the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself.

It’s almost a year now since I left Vesess and it’s been hectic. It’s great to know that the guys are doing well and destined for greater things. It’s a shame that Nidahas and Adahas are off the Kottu syndicate – if only they were updated more often… (GP, Venu – hint, hint).

Mahangu has been offline for quite some time now (or so I think), so the link to his page has become rather redundant.

Meebo has become a lot more shiny and I kinda miss the old site already.

Firefox 2 came out and now I’m wondering how long before it’ll be exactly like Opera.

And that’s my two cents for the month.