rohitj's domain

I didn’t mean to upgrade this site, but since I screwed up some files, and i didn’t have backup, I took this opportunity to shift this site from “self designed CMS + 3 wordpress blogs” to “wordpress multi user”.  I expected wordpress MU to ease my life a lot, but thats not true.  It only made it tough. wordpress MU is not a good substitute for what I had before. Its no doubt good if you want to create a blog for each student in your school, like navya did for IIT Kanpur (see http://blogs.iitk.ac.in/). Though I hope/think that in long run it will be helpful.

While upgrading, thing went smooth apart from one problem. When you install wordpress, by default it creates a blog, and its posts has URL /blog/blah blah. But /blog/ will give 404 error. Now, this meant I could import all my posts from old blog, and I don’t have to worry about indexing by different search engines.  But feed url shifted from /blog/feed/ to /feed/. Now this was bad. So, I tried to change settings so that this defualt blog could work properly with /blog/ urls. But alas, it didn’t work out well. and I am pretty much sure that there is no way of doing so. So, I wrote some rewrite rule sin htaccess and now it works. (hopefully). This site was useful : http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds.

If  you find any problem with the site, please let me know

So, you are a geek. You want to write lot of technical things on your wordpress blog. And since you are a geek you want to write technical things in Latex. How do you do? One way is that you write latex code, make pdf, take screenshot, pick the desirable part, and use that image on blog. Ofcourse thats inconvenient and surely doesn’t go with your nerd personality. You want to write Latex code in your blog post. Here are 2 solutions. One is that you use wp-latex plugin. Using this plugin you will be able to write proper Latex code in your blog using <latex></latex> tags. But the problem is that this plugin uses Latex, which is not usually supported by web hosts, including Bluehost. And installing tetex locally is painful. So, here comes the second solution. Use mimetex. Checkout http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mimetex.cgi?l_2 . Similarly you can get other latex output by replacing l_2. One guy used this property and made a plugin. Using this plugin you can use latex code, basically mimetex (which is a bit different from Latex) with <tex></tex> tags. I couldn’t get it working. Another guy changed this script and made it working with \[tex\]\[\/tex\] tags. It didn’t work as well. This new plugin downloads this image and stores in wp-content/cache folder. But it downloads this image every time someone opens the post. Of course it consumes lot of server and bandwidth. So, I made a small tweak in it. I replaced it’s 15 lines with 1 line. Basically, now instead of downloading the image, it puts src as http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mimetex.cgi? blah blah. And see I am able to use latex code.

Enjoy

Update : You can download the plugin (after my modification) from Plugin for using Latex

Update2 : The plugin is under GPL.

Update3 : So, the code I changed was suggested by Nitin Munjal. You can find him here

Last week was a different week for me. My schedule was all screwed. In general, I slept at around 4PM (IST) and woke up at 11PM. But, this wasn’t that bad schedule as I got good peaceful lonely time to work. Though, last week I slept for just 30 hours. I had exam which is screwed big time. Then had assignments and the biggest part was used for BTech Project. I had some tough time doing the work my guide gave to me. Though it was interesting at the end. As, I got to learn lot of things. And then yesterday’s meeting went well. I have now a lot of things to do. Most of it are the things that even my professor himself have no idea about. I think I am going to enjoy my BTech Project.
And yeah, I have started another blog to write about the work I am doing in the project. Check out  www.rohitj.net/researchblog/ . It’s again powered by wordpress.

What Google services have you used?

I have used the followings :

Search Engine : Its awesome. Does some one has any doubt about it?

Reader : Well, I recently started using Google reader. I have not used other readers, but I had once made an rssfeed reader. Well, if someone will give me an option, I will use my rssfeed reader. My rssreader was made on .net framework (mercy, please). I have not tested it on Mono. Surprising my thunderbird on Fedora doesn’t give me option for “news and rss” account. And anyways, thunderbird sucks for networks with proxy. My rssfeed reader has proper proxy support. But the point is that I want my data on net, so that I could access it from anywhere. But at the same time, its a bit inconvenient as well.

Calendar : Currently, I am using Google Calendar. I mainly use it to keep track of the money transactions and birthdays. I don’t use it that frequently. It’s not worth seeing online calendar. I want desktop application and online application both. I don’t think google calendar can be a solution. Whats going in Evolution? Really, Office Outlook is far too good for this purpose.

Documents : I don’t prefer it. It’s very slow.

Photos : Picasa is good. I do not have doubt about it. But Gallery2 and digikam combo is better. Both are free. Its working fine on my site. rohitj.net/photo . I will write a separate review on it.

Blogspot : Well, I have shifted from blogger to Wordpress. I did not have any problem with blogger. Blogger was equally good except the fact that there was this blue colored strip at the top of the page which didn’t go well with my green theme.

Groups : I have used 2 google-groups now. The good thing in google groups is that you can make a group which will be all email based. So, you don’t need to go to a site to see posts and to write anything. Thats cool. No advertisements, nothings. I don’t think phpBB has this email feature.

Orkut : Those who don’t know about it, orkut is like facebook. Let’s try to compare facebook and orkut. In facebook, one good thing is the privacy it gives you. Others can not see your profile unless they are your friends or you have tried to communicate with them. You can add so many photos. In orkut you can just add 12 photos. Though you can give your picasaweb address. Tagging on photo is cool in facebook. Orkut doesn’t have this application system, which is good. Facebook is so full of these silly applications. Facebook has Indox, which is good. Groups in orkut are cool. Orkut groups make you use them. Some groups are really active. Overall, I think facebook is better.

gmail : I have used yahoo and hotmail as well. I think gmail is better. Well, the user interface is no doubt sucky. There is no option for user made folders. Labeling thing isn’t cool. Hotmail is better for this purpose, but its too heavy. But Google spam filter is awesome. I get like 10 spams everyday. It filters it properly. In my Indox, I rarely see any spam. And unlike hotmail, it doesn’t delete spams without asking me. Yahoo anyways sucks, so lets not talk about it. I think 1GB is more than enough for a normal person. So, lets not compare space. But there is no IMAP server, thats very bad. POP3 doesn’t work as well. If they will make POP3 work properly, I will start using gmail as my main mail box. Right now, its my school mailbox.

iGoogle : ah, thats not cool. I never found any use of iGoogle.

I was tweaking some settings of my blog. And I faced a problem which was a bit horrible for a moment. Login as admin and then go to the “options” tab. There you will find 2 options, one is “WordPress address (URL)” and other is “Blog Address (URL)”. I couldn’t understand the purpose of 2 addresses. So, I started thinking weird things, as in what would WordPress URL mean. I thought it meant the actual WordPress URL (i.e. wordpress.org, it may change in future ). I didn’t think anything else as I didn’t find any point calling my blog as wordpress blog, yes it is wordpress powered, but I am not freak about wordpress. And anyways there was this another option called Blog Address. So, I changed the Wordpress address to www.wordpress.org. And what is this? It started redirecting everything to wordpress.org. Oh my gosh. What to do? I wasn’t able to login. There was no other way to revert back the settings. I first started searching some config file where these settings were stored. Couldn’t find anything. Then it struck me that all settings should be on database. So, being a database nerd, I tried understanding wordpress database. I didn’t want to screw anything, as now I have a lot of things on my blog and making it again will be horrible ( I have done it once). And cautiously, I changed one record in the table “wp_options”. The record had option_id “1″.
Its so cool to have all settings in a proper file or database.

Wordpress guys, please take this into consideration. Add some mechanism for reverting settings. And make options labels more explanatory. I think for reverting, some script that we could run through browser should be enough. Another option can be that when configuration is changed, send a mail to admin. And in that mail send a link that should revert those particular settings. So, you have to keep a log of what settings are being changed and when were they changed. Of course dependencies of settings will have to be considered. But for the time being, at least option for reverting back the last change in settings should be easy and is must.