Just heard that Delhi Half Marathon 2009 is scheduled for Nov 1st and the event would be launched day after tomorrow. Source – http://www.runinfinity.com/2009/07/airtel-delhi-half-marathon-2009-coming.html.
This year I’m again thinking of running the 1/2 marathon again. Had infact started training before I got hit by fever a couple of days ago. I have done half marathon in 2006 which was my first and had clocked 2:50 mins. This year I want to do this in less than 2:30.
Very recently I completed my first PHP assignment. While I was working with a client assisting them with a bunch of stuff like requirement gathering, hiring etc I was told about one of their existing project, which was written in PHP and was out-sourced to a vendor. The frequent changes in the requirement and loss of interest by the vendor made their life pretty difficult and wanted me to help out with new functionality that needed to be built. Of-course I readily agreed.
I quickly came up to speed with PHP – the best resource that worked for me was of-course www.php.net – I kept using it even when I was developing. Their function reference is pretty handy. I initially started coding with Zend Studio only to realize later that it would very soon expire. I switched to PHP IDE which is also an eclipse based IDE (like Zend) but was free. Being familiar with eclipse I was comfortable with both these IDEs.
The project was a web based application & I had to develop a few pages. I must admit problem looked simple initially but gradually as we spent more and more time with the client we realized that it is far more complex. At the end of it, I had ended up using a lot of java script, AJAX, JSON & JQuery all in 2-3 PHP pages.
Once I got comfortable with PHP, I tried my hand at other PHP based open source products like wordpress & joomla. Even tried installing something called sugar-crm. I have already built my blog over wordpress (currently hosted on wordpress.com) and am planning to build another website over joomla.
After moving my blog to wordpress, I realized that I don’t need a separate website any more {and hence can save on hosting fees}. WordPress is powerful enough to create a simple website using functionality offered out of the box at wordpress.com. This post explains how I managed to do that. If you too want to setup a quick website on wordpress, Please read on ……..
WordPress allows you to change visual look and feel through something known as a theme. The idea is that you should be quickly allowed to modify the visual aspects of your site without worrying too much about. Applying a theme to a blog/site is a simple matter of a few clicks. When running off wordpress.com, it allows you to pick & choose any theme out of 75 really neat ones. Mostly one should find a theme that meets his/her needs. If you are running wordpress from a hosted machine; then you can even upload any theme that you bought or downloaded free from the web and use it. I settled after experimenting with a few for a theme called “Spring loaded” from the449.
Next Besides the blog, I wanted a set of links in the top navigation that would tell a visitor about me. WordPress has this neat concept of a Page which is basically a static HTML document. Once created, your theme can create a navigational set of links on top/left/right automatically. You can even select one of these pages as the default page when someone visits your website and have a separate link (blog) that points to your blog posts. For more information, refer to this wordpress support page.
Now the only piece remaining was pointing your domain to your wordpress account. This unfortunately is a premium feature and wordpress.com requires you to pay for it. However it is not very expensive as compared to hosting a website on your own. It costs something like $9.89 for a year. However you must change the name servers for your domain to those of wordpress. This article should help you out. With these basic set of changes, your website is up pretty quickly.
What do you think? How has your experience been with wordpress – it would be great if you can share it with other readers of this blog. Of-course any opinion on guneetsahai.com is welcome.
Just migrated my blog from blogger to wordpress. I wanted to do this for quite some time now. Had played earlier on my machine with wordpress and was pretty impressed with the ease of changing themes and adding really powerful widgets to it. More importantly I’m planning to get rid of my hosting vendor (which is hosting www.guneetsahai.com and point it to my newly created wordpress blog.
Importing my blogs from blogger was a breeze and my new blog with existing daata was up with a new theme in no time. Customizing wordpress to make it look more like a website somehow is more easier than my current skills with blogger. I’m sure blogger also allows its users to do a lot of stuff but I guess I had been avoiding wp for quite some time now.
