Spaceman Spiff to the rescue
stupendousblog Narnia: About children, for children, of childrean. Very endearing and simple tale of good vs evil in a fairy land.
Potter: Grownups disguised as brain dead childrean. Idiotic mumbo-jumbo. Tries to be a complex character study, but falls flat on its face.
Narnia, all the way. Plus I love that cute kid (youngest amongst all).
Has become a fad in bollywood these days. I wonder when is Rakhi Sawant going to start. I would be interested in her blog!
Bloddy as hell boring and ridiculously pointless . I am beginning to hate with the bottom of my heart! I want to do some real work dammit!
Yet another theme change, with my intention to moving towards minimalism. Here is the gist of this theme change:
~ I wanted to move to really minimal design. I am tired of information clobbering up pages. Web 2.0 is great and all, but I am almost annoyed these days whenever I visit websites to see them so full of information and blocks all around. I want to go back to old days, where the page is simple, fast to load and clean. I think I am ready to look beyond today’s web designs.
~ The theme change itself isn’t that dramatic. I just modified my old theme a bit and made it a 1 post theme only. Now, this is as bare minimum as I want to keep (Notice, there is still a category drop down. I am in half a mind that to pull it too!).
~ I am done with Adsense / Textlink or any other forms of advertising. I have reached a stage in my life where I don’t want Google or any other company to dictate how I put my information on which page. This is my webpage, and I will put stuff the way I deem fit. I am done with page ranks, SEO, adsense and all that jazz. If anything I will use my other web playgrounds to test with those technologies. This website is purely going to by personal web stop.
~ Care for the user. I am not a popular blogger and nobody realistically goes back to read my archives. I have no desire in knowing how many people follow me anymore, nor do I care about which areas of my website do they click. All things said and done, majority of my users read only latest posts, which is what they will get on front page from now on. My regular and faithful readers who do wish to go back in time will definitely know how to do it 😉
~ Readying for a photoblog. Eventually I want this theme to extend itself as a photoblog + blog framework. Hence the desire to move towards single post / nothing else look.
This theme may change over a period of time in the next few weeks. For now, the basic layout of this will remain. Lets see how far in minimalism can I get without just vanishing content of my web page hehe!
My average day at work.
Since I haven’t really blogged in a while, here’s a photo from our Golden Gate trip few weeks ago.
This also serves as a test post to test Flickr / WordPress sync up.
Better yet, it would be great if Flickr allowed me to batch select photographs and send it to a post. Perhaps there is a way – I must find out. If there is, then another photo post is on its way 🙂
It started out as a request to Patrix to give me a feed that was separate from his one liner asides. The problem was that every time I added his feed to my reader, his one liner posts took over most of the items in my reader. And since I don’t use feed readers [Why? Its a topic of another post], and prefer to use a feed widget on my block, more often than not I would find that there were more one liners than posts by others. However as mails with Patrix revealed, separating the feeds is not a simple thing to if you use feedburner as your primary feed.
That led me to delve into some research about how to accomplish this. I wanted the main feed to be unharmed by feedburner, and yet find a way to provide a separate feed based on what my readers could ask for. A couple of options were available – Permalink redirector plugin nearly did what I wanted it to do, and Feedburner category just about fell short.
Enter mod_rewrite. I stumbled upon this as I was doing a bit of research, and hit upon some excellent posts here and here. [Please do read those posts before going ahead as they are excellent source of information] I had done some work on rewrites a while back in my last job, so it wasn’t difficult to figure out what was done. And with a few little tweaks, voila, i don’t need any plugin (Feedburner or Permalink) to redirect my feed to feedburner. At the same time, I can give out any selective feed based on categories to my readers.
How did I do that? Simple – just by adding the following line of codes at the very top of the .htaccess file. The .htaccess file resides in the root directory of your wordpress install. For example, if your wordpress install was located at www.mydomain.com/wp/ then your .htaccess would reside in wp directory.
Here’s what I put at the top of my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/stupendousman [R,L]
RewriteRule ^feed=rss2&cat=-269/?$ https://stupendous.blog/?feed=rss2&cat=-269 [R,L]
What does this say?
Simple – the third and fourth line simply say that if the user agent accessing your site is not feedburner, and if it is looking for a feed, then simply redirect it to feedburner. For example, if i type in https://stupendous.blog/feed/ then i will be redirected to feedburner feed for me. To make it work on your site, simply substitute my website for yours 🙂
The next line is more interesting.
RewriteRule ^feed=rss2&cat=-269/?$ https://stupendous.blog/?feed=rss2&cat=-269 [R,L]
I define another rewrite condition which simply says, if anybody comes looking for a feed without my slugs category (which is id=269), then instead of redirecting to feedburner, keep the original feed. By having a negative sign in “&cat=-269”, I assure that all categories except Slugs is added as a part of the feed.
Thats it! By using the simple rewrites I can keep adding or modifying the type of feeds based on what my readers request. For example, If somebody wanted my reviews feed, then I would simply add another line like:
RewriteRule ^feed=rss2&cat=29/?$ https://stupendous.blog/?feed=rss2&cat=29 [R,L]
Where cat=29 indicates my Reviews feed.
There are some caveats with the approach though. If you have a post in more than one category, and you chose to exclude the category, then the post in that category is excluded, even if it was a part of another category. I have not found a work around for this – if you find any, let me know. At some point I want to mix and match feeds from different categories. I am pretty sure it can be done, I just haven’t invested that time in it. When i do, I will let you know 🙂
I wish somebody expanded on this idea and made it into a wordpress plugin – it would be the most useful!
And please don’t forget to keep a backup of your .htaccess file!!
This was long coming. Though I have been toying with idea of captcha for long, I only could do it now. Anyways, the captcha is a simple question – and hopefully, you my dear readers know the answer. Now with combination of Akismet and Captcha, I will reduce the number of spam comments on my website.
By the way, if you get the answer wrong… may the dark lord help you!
A theme change worth keeping! I have been so tired about changing the themes again and again and reverting to back I had. This is the closest theme I have come to like, in majority because it so well written and modifying it was a piece of cake!! This theme shall stay – a few minor updates may occur, but I like this theme!!
