lucis

Installed captcha to prevent comment spam. Hope it works! Comments enabled again.

Well, this obviously doesnt take care of trackbacks. Disabled all trackbacks for now…

All comments and trackbacks on the site are disabled as of now thanks to all the comment spam that I have been receiving. It will be re-enabled once I manage to find a nice solution to the problem. Also, expect regular posting to resume only around the end of this month. Until then…

Switched the blog over to WordPress from Movable Type. The process was quite smooth. Was able to import everything effortlessly. Only problem is that all the older permalinks are broken since WP uses a slightly different permalink scheme (and I could not find an easy way of mimicing MT). Everything else looks great so far. Quite impressed by WP. Expect changes in the look and feel as I customize the templates over the next few days.

I will be using this post to maintain a changelog on this new blog:

• 12/26/2005: So less than a day after I upgrade from 1.2->1.5, WP 2.0 gets released. Upgrade was straightforward with no major surprises.
• 12/26/2005: Upgraded to WP 1.5. Got rid of many earlier changes and plugins. I’ll probably need to do something about comment spam soon.
• 02/06/2005: Changed permissions of wp-trackback.php to disable trackbacks.
• 02/02/2005: Installed captcha to help solve comment spam problem.
• 12/14/2004: Changed the name of wp-comments-post.php to reduce spam.
• 10/18/2004: Used the jaws template from here and heavily modified it. Also modified index.php a bit. Looks much better now.
• 10/18/2004: Made minor modifications to index.php to get the number of entries for each category and month archive to be displayed.
• 10/17/2004: Installed WP and imported all MT stuff. Got a new scheme for permalinks - breaks all older permalinks. Big deal!

When someone asks Donald E. Knuth about his contact information, he quickly points out that a google search for don brings up his website as the very first result (interestingly, Don Norman is third).

In less than one month since its birth, with sixteen entries, lucis.net is the first result on a google search for ankit. This is primarily due to blogchalking, and having a rather uncommon name. Nonetheless, I think this deserves some celebration! Now lets see how long it stays at the top…

Inspired by patchwork progression, I’ve decided to maintian this entry in which I list all my MT tweaks. I’ll probably add a new entry if I make a more complex change, but will try to list all the stuff I do with the blog here.

Some really good MT resources are: scriptygoddess, thegirliematters, and virtualvenus.

Okay, here is a list of various things that I’ve done with MT and the blog:

• 02/29/04: Edited stylesheet to get rid of horizontal scroll in stupid IE.
• 02/28/04: Installed the MT-blacklist plugin to take care of growing comment spam.
• 02/25/04: Changed the style sheet. Got rid of the stupid calendar. Rearranged the sidebar. I think the site looks better now.
• 01/05/04: Added a metatag to prevent refer/index.php from being indexed in search engines.
• 01/04/04: Changed RSS and atom feeds to include complete entry (use MTEntryBody).
• 01/04/04: Added the atom template. Removed references to MTIfNonEmpty since it wasnt working (even after installing the plugin)
• 12/31/03: To get thumbnail images automatically, installed netpbm and “IPC::Run”:http://www.movabletype.org/cpan/cpan-IPC-Run.tar.gz; also changed ImageDriver in mt.cfg to netpbm.
• 12/20/03: Installed the BookQueue plugin. I now have a Currently Reading heading on the right!
• 12/20/03: Installed the MTAmazon plugin.
• 12/20/03: Replaced the old referrer with refer. Added relevant code in all templates (the .htaccess trick didnt work on 1and1).
• 12/16/03: Edited style sheet template to add the pre style for code.
• 12/15/03: Added sitemeter.
• 12/14/03: Converted this page to use the textile formatting.
• 12/14/03: Installed MT-Textile plugin. Seems to make editing quite easy!
• 12/14/03: Installed the smartypants plugin.
• 12/08/03: Listed the site on blogwise, and chicagobloggers.
• 12/08/03: Signed up on blogsnob.
• 12/08/03: Got a blogchalking tattoo.
• 12/07/03: Added a list of recent referrals - replaced by refer.
• 12/07/03: Played with the stylesheet - changed colors etc.
• 12/07/03: Modified template to list categories of a post under it. Also added a categories menu.
• 12/07/03: Converted all pages to .php
• 12/07/03: Signed up on geourl.
• 12/03/03: Signed up on blogrolling.
• 12/03/03: Added extremetracking.
• 12/03/03: dirified the archiving options
• 12/03/03: Blog started!

Make quite a few customizations to the look and feel of the blog. I now have the categories of a post listed under it. Threre is also a list of categories in the menu.

Also added this really nice script to list the recent referrals to the website. Now I would know who all are linking to my blog, and also how well it does on search engines.

I tried various winamp plugins to have a “Now Playing” section on the sidebar. Here is a list of plugins that I tried: DoSomething, AMIP and WhatsPlaying. Also, some nice blog entries that talk about how this should be done are A Whole Lotta Nothing, and VirtualVenus. However, I couldnt get any of the plugins to work properly with Winamp 5. Most importantly, none was able to send a signal when stop was pressed, or winamp was closed. I guess I’ll first finish the linux install on the system, and try to get it working with xmms.

Also changed a couple of things in the stylesheet template, and the master index template. The links on the calendar should now take you to the Daily archive for that day, and not the last post for that day (MT default).

Well, thats it for the time being. Hope I’m able to generate some traffic to this site soon.

MT is awesome!! Just finished setting it up, and am ready for my first post now. Also configured the archiving options, thanks to NSLog and others.
Still playing around with it. Looks like a huge time sink though

Anyways, now that I have the basic thing up and running, I can work on making it look prettier as and when I find the time.

I’ll probably soon post a review of 21 grams, and A Game of Thrones by George R R Martin. In a word, both were awesome!