Do you need a Self Hosted WordPress blog ? Read this and Learn how to do that !!

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You guys know that I am crazy about blog design and themes etc, but I am not a designer.

I realize, that blog designing is not just about colors and header images but lot of other things, including information architecture and user experience.

I do follow a lot of blogs by wordpress designers. I enjoy reading about their experiences and experiments ; I get to learn a bit about blog layouts, blog architecture and blog designing ( at least I know these terms.right? )

I get enough inspiration from them, especially when I read something like this.

“You might find this difficult to believe…
But 2 years ago I didn’t own my domain name, had never touched a piece of WordPress code and knew nothing about blog design. In other words, everything I’ve done with WordPress and blog design in the past year has been self taught, using trial and error.”

So, it’s possible to learn wordpress designing and coding if you want to. But I was too lazy to try it out myself. Still, after following their blogs for few months, and trying different themes almost on a daily basis, I have learned enough to judge a wordpress theme, even though I can not design a theme on my own.

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Strikes, Bandh, Harthal … oh no !! nothing new to us keralites. See, today it is “Education Bandh”. Yesterday and day before yesterday they had Harthal in Malappuram district. Last Friday it was private bus operators strike and there was a strike by Merchants association last week……. yes, we are familiar with these stikes, and we know how to celebrate them ….

So, need a vacation ? try if you can find a job in Kerala, or get transferred here ….. Welcome to Gods own Country ( and devil’s own people ok ? )

This time, the strike loving keralites made history by killing an innocent school teacher while he was attending a meeting.

Sirji…. what an idea Sirji !!! kill a teacher to protest against the textbook !!!!

I can’t find words to express what I am feeling now. So leaders, ( small and big, left or right, ) when its time for election, don’t ask me for my vote.. because my vote died with that poor teacher ….

Yes, I am asking a question..again .. ” Did you help someone start blogging ?”

I think, I have managed to help a few, including her. But the thing is, most of them stopped blogging after few posts. still .. there are people who are doing it better than me.

Related question… may be... Did you bring someone to WordPress, from Blogspot ?. I know we WordPressers have a kind of habit… bringing more people from Blogspot to WordPress.

So, if you have someone to call you “Guruji” … please drop a comment here and let others visit your Shishya (s) !!

I have started blogging in Malayalam too !!

I find reading Malayalam blogs more interesting than actually writing blogs in Malayalam…. may be because I am not used to writing Malayalam online using the transliteration and similar stuff, where we write words using English letters which will be changed to the desired language automatically.

When I started reading Malayalam blogs, I found that most of them use Blogger.com since they have the transliteration feature, a feature which makes blogging in Indic languages really easy. Why don’t they just use WordPress.org or WordPress.com ? We really need more people start using WordPress, to blog in Indic languages. Don’t you think so ?

Initially I started with Blogger itself, and then started copying the content to WordPress and it worked perfect. Just that I typed everything using Blogger.com and then published it using WordPress.org blog on this domain itself. ( sssh … secret .. I have another installation of WordPress on this domain where I play with themes and now Malayalam Blogging )

If you install certain softwares, which enables transliteration on your computer, you can directly blog in Indic languages, using WordPress platform. So I installed “Keyman” and started writing to WordPress blog directly, in Malayalam.

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I know I don’t have enough experience in Malayalam blogging to actually get in to writing a review about it. These are my random thoughts on writing in Malayalam or few notes on what I am doing there.

(1) I am still trying to learn to type in good Manglish that Blogger will understand, in order to transliterate it in to Malayalam words.

(2) I do not know how Google will index blogs in Mayalam or any language other than English. I am still at zero on SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) in Indic languages including Malayalam.

(3) 99% of Malayalam blogs are on blogger.com ( or blogspot ) and there are only very few people who actually try it with WordPress.com or wordpress.org

(4) There is a good community of Malayalam bloggers.

(5) There is lot of serious blogging happening. They are discussing politics,history,international issues,poetry,culture.. and lot of serious topics.

(6) Malayalam blogging community is trying everything possible to get more people in to Malayalam blogging.

(7) Most of the Malayalam blogs are 100% in Malayalam.

(8) I am yet to see someone who is trying to make money through blogging.

(9) I need to personally ask Malayalam bloggers if they are satisfied with what they get on Blogger.com

(10) I will try to bring them to WordPress.