Pranav Bhat- Programming, Freelancing, college and more

I was just asked by a friend of mine whether I paid $10 on wordpress.com to have my blog redirected to my domain name pranavbhat.info or did I pay for a domain and then downloaded wordpress from Wordpress.org and then purchased another $10 for website hosting? So, I thought this is a good time to write the reasons why i decided to download wordpress and decided to buy a web hosting package.

1. Freedom to make changes as you want: With wordpress.com blog where in you get a “yourname.wordpress.com” blog you cannot make changes as you would have wished to. There are hundereds and hundreds of plug ins developed for Wordpress and even more, maybe thousands of themes developed for the wordpress platform. You can use these themes the way you want on a wordpress.org blog which you cant do on wordpress.com blog( Contradict me if i am wrong here but as far as i know i am not)
2. Have additional features that supplement your blog: Suppose your own a technology blog and you have a pretty good user base and a good user interaction. To enable more interaction with the users and to enhance your community you would need a forum or a message board. So, what if you want to have a forum software like PHPBB or SMB or even wordpress produced BBPress. You can do this on a self hosted blog i.e a wordpress.org blog but not on a wordpress.com blog.
3. Email Accounts: Suppose you wanted to have an email address like yourname@yourblogname.com. This is easily possible when you buy a web hosting package but relative difficult when you have a wordpress.com hosted blog. Ofcourse you can do this by buying a seperate email package and then change your MX entries at your domain registrar account. But, that would be a repetitive process. You can also have the domain registrar redirect emails sent at anything@yourblogname.com to your free email address like anything@gmail.com. So, email accounts isnt really a problem but email accounts like yourname@yourblogname.com definitely adds more professionalism and creditability. Email accounts are absolutely essential when you own a business blog.
4. Advertisements: Blogs are these days a great way to make money although it isn’t easy; but people do make money from blogs mainly in the form of advertisements and the major source of advertisements is Google Adsense. In wordpress.com hosted blog although you can promote products using affiliate links you cannot have Google Adsense on your blog. That is possible in a self hosted wordpress blog as you can see in my blog.

Having said all the above points, wordpress.com does have certain advantages above wordpress.org. Some of them are:

1. Automatic Updates: As soon as there is a new version of the wordpress platform, the wordpress.com automatically updates itself so that you dont have to manually update it. In a self hosted wordpress blog , you will usually have to update and install the blog by yourself. However, these days most web hosting packages do provide automatic installation, updation and uninstallation from their control panel usually under the fantiasco suite.
2. Better community features: Wordpress.com usually helps in building a better community as compared to a self hosted blog but if you are social networking expert or good at it then it should not be a problem even on self hosted blogs.
3. One username many blogs: On a wordpress.com blog you just need a single username to create as many blogs as you want. On wordpress.org you need to have a separate installation for each blog. Although this is resolved by the use of Wordpress Mu which is a multi blogging system on which wordpress.com is based.

So, as you can see there are several advantages for self hosted wordpress blogs and a couple of them for wordpress.com blogs. However, for me the advantages of a self hosted wordpress blog are far greater than those of a wordpress.com blog and hence i have chosen a self hosted wordpress blog as my personal cum professional blog.

Listed below are some of the web hosting and domain registrar companies listed below to assist the readers of this post:

1. GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans

2. AN Web Hosting

3. Netfirms Web Hosting: Trusted by over 1,000,000 people and growing

4. Unlimited Domain Hosting Only $9.95 a Month

5. ImHosted.com Web Hosting


I have also launched a new project category which will enable me to post the latest projects that i do as well as all the projects that I have done in the past. I will also post detailed information about the project including the technical information as well as code snippets wherever possible.

Thus please check out the my freelance programming projects and do contact me if you need to outsource any kind of programming.

Cheers!

Now, I have give all of YOU readers, another reason to comment on my blog. My blog is now openID enabled.Many of you might be asking what the heck is this openID? How good is it for me? According to Wikipedia openId is:

OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site. OpenID is a decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide.

You can read the entire article here on Wikipedia.So, what this essentially means that using an openID you can post comments in my blog using your wordpress.com, YAHOO,AOL and several more. So, now can i expect more comments from my readers ?

As you might have noticed I have taken to blogging in a big way. I got a cool new site design going and made a couple of posts that have been long pending. I always wanted to blog but never really had the motivation to and couldn’t find a reason good enough to spend time blogging until i read blogs from Darren rowse at problogger.net and Chris Garrett who have recently published a new book on professional blogging. Although i have not yet bought the book because Amazon doesn’t ship books to India yet, I am going to tell one of my friends to get the book for me the next time he visits India or in two months time when i will be in the US as a student. So, I might not be a expert in Social networking and blogging like Chris and Darren I thought I can atleast have a list of 6reasons why I blog!

So here goes my list:

• Fame: Who doesn’t want to be recognized around the world; even if its not around the world the fact that my blog is read by my friends who comment on my blog and give honest opinions about what i think is such a high. Moreover, If you develop an authority over a niche in which you are really good at then you can talk in conferences like Darren and Chris does.
• Money: Who doesn’t want a little extra income or that extra pocket money? Surely, i dont mind; and bloggers can earn a lot of money from their blogs; Although it must be advised that it is not for the faint hearted.
• Promoting your services: I have used this technique effectively. I am a freelance programmer and I have used this technique effectively over the years to get projects and find new clients. The best thing about this medium is the fact that clients come to you instead of you going to clients which i think is an awesome prospect in itself.
• Make friends:Blogging all about social interaction. You write for people to read and comment and you do the same for other peoples’ blogs. This leads to REAL friendships and not virtual ones.
• Come on TV: If the example of professional technology blogger Amit of labnol.org can be taken he has been featured on CNN-iBN. Now, it isn’t everyday that you get featured on TV.
• Satisfying your creative pursuits: Thats what I blog for most of the time as well as to vent out my frustration. You might not believe it but writing a simple post has got me out of so many frustrations and irritations that it has now become a habit for me. As soon I get angry over someone or something or get really irritated, i come online and write a short post about it(dont search this blog you wont find it here ) and the frustration reduces considerably.

So, i think these reasons are good enough for me to keep blogging and yes i will for many more years to come and will be more consistent with my blogging!

Its been a while since i last wrote a blog post; for the past 10 days or so, its just coming online, checking emails, reading the stats of my blog, checking my adsense account for my tech blog( which ofcourse doesnt make any money yet) and going offline. Now, I am not that much a blogger and you might have guessed until now that I am not that much of a good writer as well(I write programs better. Check here) but I do here and there squeeze some blog posts on this blog. So, what has kept me offline from this blog is the fact that my exams are going on and i need to give more time to my exams than my blog

The good news however is that I have only one paper left before i can sign off from K J Somaiya COE and engineering colleges for ever.

As you guys might have guessed from my earlier post that I will be going for my masters in Computer Science from Northeastern University, Boston. So, I thought this might be a good idea to post my analysis(  ;)   i can atleast try)  of my 3 years of engineering. Although people do say that engineering didn’t teach us much, i am sure if not about technology but it did teach me things about life that I wouldn’t have learnt anywhere else. So, in the next weeks to come starting from 5th of June, I will try and dig up stuff from my pensive( aka Albus dumbledore style) and  post things and  all the wonderful and not so wonderful experiences  of engineering.

Also, along with engineering, I have also gone through the process of applying to several US universities and finally getting admits from the universities to selecting the university to finally getting a visa to booking of tickets. So, I am also planning to post my experience of this process as well.

So, there is a lot to be written about and thats a difficult ask from someone who isn’t used to blogging and writing. Hence, please bear with me and encourage me(read: by the way of comments) and do check back for all these things that i have enthusiastically lined up!

Cheers!

I messed up big today! I accidentally deleted almost more than half of the blog posts in my blog reducing the size of my blog to 8 posts…yep..you read that right…8 posts…..and I a greatly disappointed with myself.How could i do such a stupid thing; that too myself being a programmer! However, I am not the only person who is at fault; wordpress, with all its glory and people going ga ga over it has been equally guilty! There was no warning of any sort when i clicked on the god damn delete button that all the post would be permanently be deleted; which is commonly the norm when you create a software!!!

So, i am highly disappointed and greatly saddened by this; but certainly a lesson learnt!!

I have just started to learn cooking and I have been learning for about a week and I must say cooking isn’t that bad as I thought. Of course its just the beginning and maybe with mom standing right behind me makes it a lot easier.

But anyways I am planning to study all the indian dishes and the staple food that we eat here in India and therefore would definitely keep you posted!

Cheers!

It seems that my Saturdays are getting better and better. Last week I had a great time shopping and eating out at this cool restaurant last saturday and this saturday was even better; we had gone to Titwala and Khadavli after college today with around 15 friends and had a great time.

I ideally would have loved to write more but right now i am too tired to write, so will definitely write more about the trip and definitely will post pics of the trip as well.

Till then ciao!

Fortunately college was over early today and therefore I got a chance to go home early; you might think what so special if you get a chance to go to college early but not at our college, so it is infact special!!

Anyways, I was looking for some refreshment and so was just surfing over channels and found out this movie that was just about to start on HBO; the name of the movie was Charlie and the chocolate factory. The movie was so cool that I was bowled over within the first ten minutes.

It was the my kind of the movie; Good over the evil, people self realizing about the importance of love and family!!

So, over all a good movie.

I just signed up for technorati which is probably the largest website on the internet which crawls only blogs and also ranks them based on their popularity. That is exactly why I have created a technorati profile which you can view below.

Technorati Profile

As always any suggestions and comments are welcome!