Habitually Good

I got an email today from an editor of Blogged.com. Blogged is a blog directory which aggregates and reviews blogs across a variety of categories. This email said that my blog has been reviewed by their editors and has received a “Great” Rating. In fact, here is the badge that I was awarded:

This is 8.3/10. I don’t even know when if I submitted this blog to their directory or it was picked up on it’s own. I have of course now claimed ownership of it. Also, when I went to see what an 8.3 rating means, it turned out it isn’t half bad.

Under the category where I was listed (Technology) there are over 13000 blogs. My blog is No. 501. That’s not too bad, I think. Although, that also means there are 500 blogs which get rated better than mine.

Anyway, back to the daily grind.

With the early arrivals of Monsoon in Delhi, it has started raining quite frequently. A while ago it suddenly started raining cats and dogs. I stepped out in the balcony and saw that 3 peacocks (one peahen actually) had taken shelter in the balcony across the street. I have a feeling they were caught in the middle since it started raining so suddenly.

Anyway, I took some pictures and here they are:

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been noticing that in the past few weeks I haven’t received as many Spam comments on this blog as I used to. That is good of course, but on the other hand it could be the lull before the storm.

In any case, I decided to see if it’s just me or has there been a slump in the number of spam comments overall. So, I headed over to Akismet.com (home for my favorite anti-spam service) and looked at the Spam graph that they maintain. Here it is below:

Read the rest of this entry »

I have always like the use of a tag cloud to explain what certain content is all about. I even try to have a good looking tag cloud on this blog. However, my tag cloud never looked as good as the ones I am about to show you now.

Here’s a tag cloud generated using the text found in Chapter 1 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been setting up an internal technology blog which will have a group of members contributing to it. The best way (I thought) of managing this was to enable LDAP authentication on the blog so that all those who are contributing can authenticate with our corporate Active Directory.

As it turns out there is only one WordPress plugin for this out there and it’s called wpDirAuth. When I found it I very happily downloaded and installed the plugin, thinking that I am done. Boy, was I wrong. I had to jump through a couple of 100 hoops to get it running, but in the end it was worth it. Here are the problems I faced and the solutions to resolve them.

Read the rest of this entry »