I seem to have managed to sort out the back end problem associated with the Movable Type upgrade.
In spite of the inherent pain involved in any MT upgrade, I would highly recommend it to any blogger still running an older version of Movable Type.
I was quite depressed about the amount of spam this weblog was attracting; hated having them on the site, having to clean them up. I was seriously thinking about taking down the individual page archive rather than waste time trying to manage spam when MT released this version which provides much more sophisticated comment management module.
I am planning to have the comments functionality back up in a few days, but with a caveat. You will need to register in Typekey (run by MT) to be able to comment on any post here. Typekey has a fairly simple registration process (and I certainly dont want the overhead of moderating comments if they can keep the spammers at bay). Also, if you register with typekey, apparently you will be able to use their authentication for any other Movable Type powered weblog (so long as that weblog accepts typekey registered accounts). Hopefully, at some point of time, Six Apart and Google will start talking to each other and one registration will suffice for both blogger and Movable Type accounts!
I have just migrated to the new version of Movable Type. The result on the backend has not been pretty. I suspect that things may be kind of unstable over the next few days. We may potentially be out of circulation for a few days while we try to iron out the kinks
My new posts are up at IndiaEconomyWatch.
I am thinking through how best to cross link to posts on IndiaEconomyWatch. One way to do this is to display the links to my new posts on IEW on the nav bar. The other (easier) is to post all my IEW posts here too (which is what Edward does).
I dont want to mix up the two blogs. So the former is probably better. But I also do want to follow my train of thoughts as I chase stories/ideas on Indian Economy. I am thinking of creating something like economy.kaush.com and post my IEW entries there too after a few days of posting them on IndiaEconomyWatch.
Go check out my new posts at IndiaEconomyWatch. I'll be back here on tuesday.
Edward and I are collaborating on India economy watch. Please go there and check out my first post on that weblog. More soon.
I now have a slightly longer list of links on the right hand nav. It is a compromise between what I read regularly, what I would like to read regularly and what I want to have there as an easy reference. I don't want the links list to become so long that it becomes ungainly and difficult to use. On the other hand, I do want to add on to this. I think the best thing to do would be to have a seperate links page which can be properly categorized.
I realized as I was adding links that I read way too much news and politics. I could fill my entire navigation with 'media and politics' links. It also helps that there are so many good political weblogs. But I really, really want to wean myself off that stuff. I ought to be reading more about retailing, supply chain and data warehousing. But there is no one doing a weblog on these subjects. Retailing people don't seem to be particularly enamoured of the web.
I have added a category archive to the right hand menu. I am still fiddling around with the category definitions and categorizations. It will probably keep evolving over the next few days. In case you find a post which is not properly categorised, please let me know.
I started this weblog one year back on this day. It started simply as a place to post my links. It has turned out to be a lot more rewarding and satisfying an experience than I expected it to be. When I look back, I realize that I am a lot better informed and write better because of RandomNotes. It has rekindled my interest in serious writing. It has also connected me to some very interesting people who I would not have known without RandomNotes.
To those of you, who check this page from time to time, thank you for hanging around.
I have been taking a lot of pleasure over the last few days in tinkering with the template. I finally got rid of the tables. I stole the basic CSS code from Glish and Bluerobot like many others before me and patched up something which is more to my liking. I also used Phil Ringnalda's script generator to change my archive template. The comment box still looks rather ugly! I hope to get to it sometime soon. I also want to make the site XHTML compliant, but am slightly intimidated by the prospect.
Incidentally,I didn't know that Phil Ringnalda has migrated his site to Movable Type (MT). Phil is almost like a Blogger institution. Jason Kottke has also moved his site to MT yesterday. I have earlier read good things about MT. But getting both Jason and Phil to sign up must be quite a coup for MT! In the blog world, that's publicity money can't buy.
Please let me know in case the style sheet doesnt work for your browser (Almost all of you seem to be using 5x or higher of Netscape, IE or Opera. So it should work!).
I am trying to migrate this site to CSS. The formatting has gone topsiturvy. And I have taken out the links to the archives out until I can get the site back in shape. Bear with me! I have got worse problems on my hands right now
Tieing up loose ends:
It looks like I managed to move my weblog without any major trouble! I hope to modify the look and feel by the next weekend.
I was browsing through my referral logs and search reports this weekend. Every now and then some people come here via google searching for some rather outlandish stuff. I now feel compelled to declare that this weblog doesn?t have anything to do with 'naked girls in Santa Cruz'. For anyone looking for nude beaches in Santa Cruz, the best bet is probably to drive up highway 1 North of Santa Cruz and look for cars parked with nothing in sight. I believe there are a few south of Davenport.
On my January 21's post, I wrote of James Lick, the man who funded the building of Lick Observatory; "He apparently toyed with the idea of building the world's greatest pyramid in downtown San Francisco, but was persuaded to build the greatest telescope by U.of California." That is what the Lick observatory employee who acted as our tour guide told us. I recently read in the book 'San Francisco is your home' by Samuel Dickson that Lick originally wanted to build the observatory in what is now South of Market in San Francisco, but was persuaded instead to build it in Mount Hamilton. Pyramids make for a better story. But I didn't find any reference to it in Dickson's account. Its probably an apocryphal story.
Errata:
Admission to SFMOMA is free only on the first Tuesday of every month as opposed to every Tuesday as I originally wrote on my last Thursday?s post. (Thanks Archana, for pointing that out)
Important
I am hoping to move this weblog to kaush.com by the end of next week. If you would like to be notified when RandomNotes moves to the the new url, please sign up through the form on this page. I'll send you a mail when I migrate this site.
I am told that migration from blogspot can be a traumatic experience :(. So dont be too surprised if things get a little wobbly for a few days.
Much of the content on this weblog is built around the interesting links that I find on and about the net. But, lately, I have been finding less and less time to surf for fun. Mostly, what I get time for these days, are the newspapers. So far as that goes - I am reasonably sure that I can't bring any fresh insight into the middle east conflict!
I guess what I am trying to say is - the personality of this weblog would probably change some in the coming weeks. I wont try to articulate what it is going to be about. Its a futile effort. My weblog has a way of sabotaging my efforts to classify it. I'll take it as it comes.
I was surfing through O'Reilly Network's Weblogs . Its a cool place, but it is mildly exasperating for people who are not familiar with the O'Reilly Network. You would thing that O'Reilly would know enough about information navigation to have some kind of a directory. There actually isnt any good directory or search engine for weblogs out there. But the number and size of Weblogs in O'Reilly is managable enough for them to be able to categorize them properly.
Anyway, Gordon Mohr's weblog has the scoop on what is happening on Kazaa - the P2P file sharing software. Gordon is the CTO of Bitzi - a similar company that apparently 'identifies, describes, and discovers files of all types'. Sounded a little like a Microsoft web services pitch to me, but the site looks interesting. Would spend some time exploring it this weekend. I also ran into ONLamp.com somewhere there. It seems to be a great resource for web development, using linux, apache, mysql, perl, php, python. I have been planning to look into php for some time. I heard that PHP Manual is the best online resource for it. But OnLamp seems to cover the other related technology areas too.
BTW, I am trying to migrate my bookmarks from IE to Opera. If someone knows an easy way, please drop me a note.