wordpress 6

In 2009, I migrated from a self-made Perl static site generator to WordPress because it was slow, WordPress was dynamic and rapidly growing in features, and I wanted to write rather than code. (Also, I had plenty of time in 2009 for such things!) Over the years, problems crept in. Hosting costs ($200/year) for a slow server. No local writing - Windows Live Writer was dead. I wasn’t using most WordPress features. So it was time to migrate back to a static site generator. (Also, I now have plenty of time for such things!) ...

Thejesh tagged me with these questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I started my website in 1997 on Geocities at https://www.geocities.com/root_node/, mostly talking about me. (A cousin once told me, “Anand’s site is like TN Seshan - talking only about himself.” 🙂) (As an aside, I didn’t know that searching for Geocities on Google renders the results in Comic Sans!) I wanted a place to share the interesting links I found. Robot Wisdom by John Barger and Scripting News by Dave Winer were great examples: collection of interesting links updated daily. ...

Once you’ve installed XAMPP, download Wordpress and unzip it into your xampp/htdocs folder. You’ll first need to create a database, which you can do by visiting the /phpmyadmin/ on your localhost, typing in the database name and pressing ‘Create’. Now go to /wordpress/, click the buttons and fill out the form. Type in 'root' for the database username and leave the password blank. Select any password you want for the administrator account. You can now log in with this administrator password and log into the Wordpress dashboard. ...

That dip there in response time is thanks to WP-SuperCache. My average page load time has dropped from 1 second to 0.25 seconds.

With all the discussion around URL shorteners, Diggbar, blocking it, and the rev=canonical proposal, I decided to implement a URL shortening service on this blog with the least effort possible. This probably won’t impact you just yet, but when tools become more popular and sophisticated, it would hopefully eliminate the need for tinyurl, bit.ly, etc. Since the blog runs on WordPress, every post has an ID. The short URL for any post will simply be http://www.s-anand.net/the_ID. For example, http://s-anand.net/17 is a link to post on Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude D420. At 21 characters, it’s roughly the same size as most URL shorteners could make it. ...

One of the reasons I moved to WordPress was the ability to write posts offline, for which I use Windows Live Writer most of the time. The beauty of this is that I can preview the post exactly as it will appear on my site. Nothing else that I know is as WYSIWYG, and it’s very useful to be able to type knowing exactly where each word will be. The only hitch is: if you write your own WordPress theme, Live Writer probably won’t be able to detect your theme — unless you’re an expert theme writer. ...