About blogging,wordpress hosting and books

If I am lucky enough, I will have this in my hand within two months.

“When someone is seeking…it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything…because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.” Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

I read this book in Malayalam and I am finding it little difficult to express, what it was like. I feel great, … I feel, I got something that will help me look at life and people from a perspective which is very much different from what it is now.

It’s tough to understand, sometimes, like when he says “There is no past, or future, …. everything is present. ..”  It is tough, when he says,

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So, what happened to my reading habit ?

Bad news first : I am yet to finish the book ” God of Small Things”.Now the good news : I am still reading it, and I am reading few other books too.

Yes, I am still reading God of Small Things. I loved it, and was inspired enough to rename my blog to, Blog of Small Things. Offline Blog was a temporary name, and I was looking for a new name all this time. So, here we are , with the new name, “Blog of Small Things” How is that ?

I visited my village library, paid a fine for not returning a book for 1 year. Librarian is a great friend of mine, so I got the fine amount reduced to Rs.100. And yea, I bought 3 more books from Cochin last week.

I am fighting my “readers block” ( Thanks Nikhil for that term ). It is tough, real tough. I tried lot of things, and got a lot of suggestions.

I am going back to Malayalam books now, because that is where I started, and that is where I should start correcting my reading disorders. Reading Malayalam books may help me make reading much faster, hopefully …..

So, do you blog in Indic Languages ? I do, at times. I was using Blogger.com for this, because, only blogger had the transliteration feature. Now, that we have this extremely useful plugin for wordpress, I can leave blogspot and come back to Wordpress.

What is Google’s Transliteration ?

Google Indic Transliteration offers an option for converting Roman characters to the Devanāgarī characters used in Hindi. This lets you type Hindi words phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation — it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning. For example, typing “hamesha” transliterates into Hindi as:

Yes, you heard it right. You type it in Hinglish or Manglish, google will transliterate it in to Hindi, or Malayalam. You do not need to know anything about typing in those languages. ( Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu )

Google Indic Transliteration WordPress Plugin

So, here is the plugin. It’s called “Google Indic Transliteration WordPress Plugin”. The plugin is still under development, it works only on HTML mode ( on your wordpress dashboard ) at the moment. But, wait for more, you will see it getting better soon.

Author’s Website Plugin Homepage Download Now

Languages Supported : Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu

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So you want a self hosted wordpress blog ? hmm that’s a good idea. It’s always good to own a little piece of web for yourself.

First, you should get a domain name. Yes, think hard, and select a domain name. But, keep domain registrar’s website open while you are doing this serious thinking. Because, you need to make sure that the domain that you want to register, is actually available. You can’t register someone Else’s domain name

You can use any of the following checkdomain.com register.com godaddy.com So, when there is a domain name ready, you can register it.

Tip: Do not register the domain straightaway , if you are planning to buy hosting for 1 year, or 2 years, most of the webhosts give you a free domain name with the hosting plan, you can make use of this offer.

It is okay to have the domain name registered with one company, and webhosting with another one. So, if you someone who can share their webspace with you, you can simply register a domain name from any  registrar, and start hosting

Some technical stuff

What makes a website ? ( from a webhost’s view ). It’s a domain name and some server space. It is possible that, domain name is registered at the company “A” and the server space is at company “B”.

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