i3pep.org

This website http://anup-mukherjee.blogspot.com had been a stop-gap arrangement till the main website i3pep.org would be working properly. Now that the main site i3pep.org is working properly, is active and fully functional to my satisfaction, the visitors, who have stumbled across to this site are requested to visit the main site at http://www.i3pep.org

Website Again

The biggest problem with cutenews/ ajfork is that there is no clean url. Meaning - the URLs look like:

"http://www.i3pep.org/index.php?
subaction=showfull
&id=1097760183
&archive=
&start_from=&ucat=7
&"

Now this is messy and simply a bad thing, if anyone wants to have a good website.

Clean urls can come in various ways, however the most important thing is that the visitor / user of a website should be able to clearly identify the webpage. And this should be easy to recall. For example http://www.i3pep.org/main/info.php?id=3 should be quite easy to remember and in a way non-messy. Eventhough this does not qualify itself as "clean URL" as is technically understood.

It was because of this that I installed the bmachine blog system that uses a SQL database. Now its installation is a bit messy. Yet it is easy to use. However what is really bad with its latest version is that its search feature is buggy. The search simply does not work. Why I chose that bmachine was that it is a small software.

However it again seems to me that it would perhaps be much better if I go for a bigger CMS like the wordpress. Yet that issue is a bit unresolved, becuase I would not like to spend lot of time modifying the templates etal. Also another thing relating to the wordpress is that the way it displays clean URLs through use of .htaccess file is unsupported by my server.

In that situation a simple to use blog system would be much better that has a easy to remember URL system and an inbuilt good search feature. So even if I wished to shift my contents to the newer system with a better URL, the bug in the search feature of the bmachine stops me.

What all these indicate is that my website is going to be slow in its development. I would have loved to use the Blogger for my website (I tried that briefly), however it seemed more useful to have the blogger at its default website and also as an alternate way of web-publication.

The Writer's Itch

The Journal of Occasional and Trivial Rhetorics and Screed, thats what this is. Can also be called a "writer's itch". Sometimes its difficult to stop. However that cannot go officially on the Homepage. Therefore this Journal.

I had just only though that this journal I am going to use "only sparingly". However the email only makes it much easier. Sometimes, its easier to compose on the email client than on a wordprocessor ;) or even online.

With this Journal in a workable condition, technically I would have preferred a full integration of the Blogger with this website, as it provides a very nice flexibility. However that would mean opening new issues relating to design and customisation. An interesting thing, however quite a boring thing as well (more on this later).

There are also the issue of control. One never knows what changes an external provider might bring in, where one could just be left high and dry. Issues like future compatibility, backward integration et al. However at least currently one has full faith on Google that things wont go that very wrong.

For that matter, I would have preferred a complete XHTML with all the features of XML, RSS, ATOM etc. Some of the features like the RSS is possible even in the current setup of aj-fork that this website is using, however I am contented with the HTML system within the PHP framework. However the ATOM syndication is possible using the Blogger scheme.

Though I would like to improve the appearance of this website and bring in the above mentioned features (if necessary later on by installing wordpress or b2evo - one never knows ;) , yet at least for now, I am content.

Why I am satisfied is because for me "Content" is more important than coding. I am not a programmer, nor intend to be one. Sometimes for maintenance of websites the coding work and doing all sorts of related ftp and chmod etc takes the fun out of it. The technical thing is not difficult, only that does not give me fun - it simply bores me.

At some point of time, one does start thinking - Hey I am not a geek (or nerd?). I would much rather prefer to do a straight way posting of articles. For myself and perhaps for this website, content is of primary importance.It is perhaps because of this that the email system is much more preferred by me.

However blogger does have limitation, in the sense that it does not provide for categories. Instead, it provides for separate blogs. Though one can overcome that and can get around it with some ingenuity. However single blog with categories is much more preferable than managing separate blogs for separate subjects. But Blogger does provide with static pages (the permalink as it is called).

Overall, it adds a nice bit of flexibility and usefulness. I also made functional a new blog on South Asia at Blogger. The URL is http://southasia.blogspot.com. I have not exactly started posting on that yet. I would rather prefer to think of the alternatives, whether that Blog sould remain on the blogger or really get posted on this website.

Till then its nice and easy keeping up with some trivial rhetorics and the irresistible writer's itch.

i3pep.org : Messages by eMail

I had an account with the Blogger (blogger.com) for sometime now. However I had not used it much and had gradually moved away to creating my own website. Initially I had started with coding of the pages in pure html. However gradually I realised that it was quite a problem when new pages required to be added. This meant that all the pages had to be recoded for the links.

Gradually I shifted on to the blogging system. A very basic blogging system based on php was that of cutenews (cutephp.com). I started using it, but gradually moved on to a forked version of it by the name of aj-fork.

Still I continued to miss a significant feature. This was blogging by email. I was considering how to make it happen, whether I would need to install something bigger like the Wordpress (wordpress.org).

Recently the Blogger again caught my attention. This was the feature of blogging by email. Now I am not aware when this service of blogging by email was started - perhaps after the blogspot scheme came under the banner of Google.

I was contemplating of putting a link from my website to the particular blogger webpage. However, best of all, I could ftp the blog on to my website. And then was born this journal.

While the website would continue to be moved through its main system and articles would be posted as is currently being done, this scheme of Journal is being done as an additional method whereby one is able to communicate through the email system with the website. This is adding one more functionality to the whole system of web management.