Cosmetic Changes

I found some time a few weeks ago to make a few cosmetic changes to my blog theme. You can skip this if you don’t care. This is more of a changelog to keep track of things than something interesting to read.
The most significant is the addition of gravatars to the comments section. If you [...]

Filed under: Misc

Cursed Land of the Eternally Incompetent

Getting a passport is a ridiculously difficult task in this fucked up country.
Went to the passport office on Wednesday. Stood in the queue for 45 minutes. Came back since they didn’t accept my Airtel landline bill for address proof.
Went to the passport office today. Stood in the first queue for 30 minutes. Finally they tell [...]

Filed under: Chennai City, Misc

I’ll Be Back, On Tuesday

I’m heading to Munnar for a few days with the family. We’re taking the train today afternoon and we should be back on Tuesday.
So if you screw up something you’re on your own. If you have Cpanel access then you can fix problems by yourself anyway. Read a damn tutorial.

Filed under: Misc

I Bring You Improvements

Comments Section
A few people told me that they couldn’t find the comments section since there was no obvious link to it. You could get to the comments by clicking on the post title or by clicking on the number of comments displayed on the left side of each post. Now I have added the word [...]

Filed under: Misc

Updated to WordPress 2.5

The newest version of WordPress (version 2.5) came out five days ago and I decided to update today.
The problem with updating within weeks of a new version coming out, especially when the version has significant changes, is that plugins and themes become incompatible. So instead of just upgrading over the current blog installation like I [...]

Filed under: Misc

Shoutbox Demoronisation

A large number of morons are leaving stupid messages like ‘hi’ and ‘is anyone there’ in my shoutbox and it’s very annoying. As if deleting all the spam wasn’t enough I have to tolerate these idiots who think the shoutbox is a chatroom.
So from now I shall be deleting messages from all users who don’t [...]

Filed under: Misc

‘Most Commented Posts’ Widget Added

After adding the top commenters plugin in the sidebar, I decided to add a list of the ten posts with the most comments. I found a plugin to do the job and you can see the result for yourself, just above the top commenters plugin.
Screenshot:

What interesting is that most of the comments won’t be on [...]

Filed under: Misc

My Blog’s Top 10 Commenters

I installed a plugin to display the top ten commenters on my blog. I was curious to see who had commented the most in the few years that had passed since I started this blog.
I added the widget to my sidebar, refreshed the page and…
Holy crap. See for yourself.

I’m thinking if I should change it [...]

Filed under: Misc

ICICI Bank Minimum Balance Is Rs. 10K!

I went to the nearest ICICI bank branch this evening with my father to open a new savings bank account. ICICI has good internet banking features and customer service and my dad was satisfied with them so he recommended I open an account with them.
The problem is, they have changed the quarterly minimum balance to [...]

Filed under: Misc

WP SpamFree Is Really Good

Earlier I had talked about WP SpamFree, a new WordPress plugin that promised to drastically reduce the number of automated comment spam that plague most blogs.
I would like to report that the plugin is very very effective. The Akismet spam queue which used to have about one hundred entries a day now has just one [...]

Filed under: Misc