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I've been messing with this

for far too long, but I am pleased to announce that I have added a couple of new (archive-related) features to this site:

  • An archives landing page that displays a random post from the archives, and enables you to either search or browse the archives.
  • A sidebar widget displaying a selection of posts from the archives for your delectation.

Enjoy!

So I'm on a month-long

consulting engagement clear across the country, meaning that I’m flying there and back every week. It’s the reason I didn’t blog at all last week, and if last week is anything to go by, I probably won’t blog too much in the coming weeks, either. It’s not that I don’t have time in the evenings, but that I apparently prefer to come back to the hotel and aggressively veg out. So long story short, maybe you’ll see me this month, maybe you won’t.

Also, the Language Nazi says: Don’t ever use the word “blog” to refer to a blog post (e.g. “I was reading that blog you wrote yesterday, and I totally disagreed with you, man.”). It’s wrong, and annoys the hell out of me.

Phew

Yesterday sometime, both one of my sites and my sister’s site were compromised and flagged by Google as possible malware distributors. Not good.

The good news is that I’ve found the bad files, removed them, and taken steps so that this won’t happen again. All but one of the sites have been flagged as clean again (the last one is pending review), and the warnings removed.

My apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused readers.

Too funny for words

So you may have seen me mention before how, every day since I wrote this post about a workaround for the IE7 z-index bug, it has accounted for anywhere between 25 and 50% of my traffic.

Which is cool, don’t get me wrong. But when I was checking out my site statistics this morning, I realized that one of my more recent visitors, going to that post, was coming from the microsoft.com domain, meaning that s/he is a Microsoft employee.

Oh, the irony is simply delicious.

Small is the new big

It seems like everything these days—internet presences included—is being chopped up into bite-sized, easily digestible pieces.

A bunch of my friends have started a mass migration toward short-format blogging or messaging services like Twitter and Tumblr, likely because the barrier to entry and activation energy of those services is much lower than those of the now-traditional blog.

Links to those friends’ Twitter & Tumblr accounts:

Enjoy!

As for me, I’m going to stick with the longer-format medium, because I am nothing if not verbose. And besides, you’ve got to get your fiber from somewhere, right? ;)

ALERT: changing URLs

Phew. I did some domain reshuffling and site reorganization tonight, to hopefully make URLs on my domain a little more sensible. Long story short, the URL for this blog is now http://richa.avasthi.name/blogs/tepumpkin/. The old address (http://blogs.ravasthi.name/tepumpkin/) will still work (it just redirects to the new address) for the next little while. Please update your links accordingly. Thank you, and apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Some improvements

Most of this is under the hood, but I’ve made some changes to this blog to improve your experience:

  • I spent some time just now adding new categories, and re-categorizing posts more meaningfully. There should now be no posts marked “Uncategorized”.
  • I’ve added a “Most commented posts” section (thanks to this plugin) to the sidebar, so you can see what I’ve written that people seem to get most exercised about.
  • Commenting improved! I’ve added plugins to show users a live preview of their comments, and also given them the ability to edit comments they’ve posted for a fixed time after the posting.