History

Tomorrow, I complete one year of blogging. It is only natural that I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia at this moment and look back at what led to the birth of this site.

Long back ago, during the time of the internet boom, there was a company by the name namezero which decided to give away domain names for free. Yes, you read that correct. Domain names for free. I must admit, a bit shamefacedly, that I took full advantage of this offer and ended up booking close to 50 domains :-) In addition to itismylife.com I had other interesting names like infosys.org and imaginati0n.com. But I never used them for anything other than vanity email ids. By the by, I used to get resumes from unknown people hoping to land a job at infosys !

This state of affairs continued for a long long time. At around this time last year, India was rocked by the Gujarat riots. In a mail to a classmate, I wrote up something which I thought needed a much wider audience. The idea of putting it on my website came to my mind and I searched for methods to do it. It was at this point that I came across the word blogging for the first time and immediately I was hooked. I signed up for a blogger account and published my article at blogspot.com.

The article was later on published at rediff.com.

Within a short time, I understood the deficiencies of the blogger system and jumped over to upsaid.com. I was with them for a long long time and it was a fruitfull association. Meanwhile, I was send to the united states for an assigment.

With a few dollars in my hand, I suddenly had an itch to move to a self hosted solution which is what I did, getting a new domain in the process. I also discovered the power of nucleus and ended up contributing quite a few plugins as can be seen at the forum.

Since then, Things havent changed much but for the entry of suresh.

So that in a few words was the history behind this site.

What lies ahead ?

I am planning to relaunch itismylife.com at some point in this month. The idea is to have a couple of niche blogs ie blogs targeted at a niche audience and highly specific to one topic. The pages here will continue to be the place holder for my general writings and link collections.

If all goes well, I will be writing a similar post one year from now :-)

Nucleus.

I am a big fan of nucleus ( which is what is used as the backend script for this site ).

Why ?

The first choice to be made when anyone looks for a weblog script is to decide whether to go for static publishing or dynamic publishing. Dynamic publishing can be a big overhead if you have a lot of visitors and the database chokes on the number of connections per second. On the other hand, static publishing can be a big pain if you change your templates or skins as frequently as I do.

I did play around with movable type for some time but found it incredibly slow. Again, the fact that 2.51 might be the last free version ( ? ) put me off. I didnt want to get stuck with something which will not move forward unless I pay for it.

I found nucleus to be a well-designed script with a really cool plugin interface which enables me to extend the script in whatever direction that I want without bothering karma :-)

I have been writing a few plugins for nucleus like the Macros plugin or the Ping pong plugin or a few others about which you can find more information here.

Today, I have coded up something which I wanted for a really long time. Click on the comments link and check out my new threaded comments plugin. This is alpha code. So please be gentle with it. If you come across any errors, kindly send me a mail with a small explanation of what went wrong.

Enjoy :-)

Nostalgia.

Did anyone know that I was a blogspotter once ?

Does anyone remember the first design of itismylife.com ?

Or even this or this ?

After a long period of drifting aimlessly, I have reached a point where I am satisfied with my blog tool and host. Only the design will change from now onwards :-)

Dummy post.

Please ignore this post.

This is only to test the new Trackback plugin in my blog.