Author Archives: Administrator

Oh, who cares who sang that song before?
It really didn’t matter.

What you do if you want to sing?
And you never had any training,
And you never had an original song to sing?
— Hey, you just sing, anyway!

– Usha Uthup.

https baby!

That was long overdue! I’ve been meaning to add secure certificate for the domain (and all subdomains) amrute.me for quite some time. Finally, I made the site connection secure, thanks to Let’sEncrypt.

By the way you should donate to its wonderful cause of providing SSL/TLS certificate for free (even the wildcard certificates!!) LetsEncrypt is free, automated & Open certificate authority(CA).

Secret Book

I tweeted about it and viola, mission fulfilled within a week.

So the law of attraction from the secret book really works, huh?

5 growth hacking tips from AirBnB

Rebecca, Growth hacker at AirBnB, explains her success with the experiments AirBnB did at the early years of the startup. Here’s 5 tips to go extra mile when everything else fails or isn’t enough. or to use the title she used here’s :

5 Guerrilla Tactics When the Slick Stuff Fails

Ah! And by the way, if you noticed, this is not your ordinary YouTube embeded video (although it’s uploaded on YouTube!). The video is indexed on clipmine to easily navigate and skip to relevant parts. Cool!

Great insights and something new I learned today.
NPS stands for net promoter score!
Litmus for Email testing & analysis.
Thanks the internet & thanks Rebecca, & 500 Startups.

Look papa, New theme!

Finally made a move to fully responsive theme (not bootstrap through). In the process of doing so, I replaced my old theme files (404.php); so instead of copy new files in new theme folder, I copied them to old theme directory. I did that on my webserver (Ubuntu Server) on terminal using SSH. And unfortunately there’s no undo in CLI. 🙁 I’m glad I’ve started using Git now.

In love with Bootstrap

Recently, I realised that my unchanged theme (since 2011!) is obsolete. Although this blog is mobile friendly (thanks to jetpack, we’ve mobile theme), I’ve been thinking of single responsive theme that would work across all devices. While researching the solution, I discovered many ‘cool’ themes &  I must confess, I’m in love with Bootstrap. It’s such a fun playing around.
I might implement Bootstrap CSS on this blog some time soon…

classic theme

I checked my blog (front side of the blog) after so many days. The fonts and site design looks old-fashioned, kind-of ‘classic’. Yes, then default theme TwentyTen for the WordPress has officially become classic. I’ll re-design my websites soon.

Joining hands with IIC

i2c

Internet Infrastructure Coalition


Joining hands with Internet Infrastructure Coalition.
This week I attended WHD.India where I got opportunity to talk to David Snead of I2Coalition, the public interest body for the internet and its culture. I learned that something similar to I2Coalition is coming to India & I’m looking forward to be part of it.
The current website has these banners that you can use to help spread the word and promote the effort.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid – Albert Einstein*

That sums the current state of the educational system of universal design for instruction and assessment.

einstein-quote

Assessing everyone using same test and scale proves totally unfair.

The examiner in pic says:

For fair selection everybody has to take the same exam: Please climb that tree.

I don’t want this measurement to be used in my company. We don’t have dedicated HR department for assessment and sometimes it’s convenient to use universal design. But that will unfair for some. #justsaying. I’m currently reading this thought-provoking book called Maverick
– related to HR and work culture.
*P.S. I cannot confirm whether the quote used above is Einstein’s or not but it conveys my point with the illustration below.

WindowsPhone 8 owners get 20GB more SkyDrive space

The Windows Phone 8 owners have more to cheer for this Christmas. Today I received an email from Microsoft showing some love for me purchasing Windows Phone 8 device. They have offered 20GB extra space in SkyDrive storage for 1 year.  *something similar you get if you’re an MS Office 365 home premium subscriber.

skydrive

All WP8 device owners- claim additional 20GB SkyDrive storage space as Enthusiast bonus!


Unfortunately for me my Office 365 premium subscription neither gave me Skype world minutes nor 20GB+ SkyDrive space. The MS support rep suggested me to restart (cancel and start again) my 365 plan to rectify the error. Well, I didn’t restart my office 365 home premium service & stopped its service. To make it up, I got this email first thing in the morning! Thank you Microsoft. I hurried redeem the code & claimed the extra SkyDrive storage.
& what do I see? Oh yeah, baby! 45 GB of SKYDRIVE with 20GB as “Enthusiast bonus!” Now don’t be jealous, I’ve been a loyal member of SkyDrive & using it since 25GB era.

Moved

We have moved our sites to a better server. Migrating to an un-managed private server is quite an experience, but you get to play with Linux distro of your choice and learn a lot in the process.  Plus, you get freedom, root access, and can make partitions, clone the system, can build OS & webserver of your choice from scratch. Although WordPress doesnt need a lot of freedom or root access, simple LAMP stack with mod_rewrite enabled apache would be adequate. I chose Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS & Apache 2.2. I must admit that complexity or freedom was not the reason for this move. I’ve few complex wordpress sites running with multisite or buddypress/bbpress  setup; & they’ve been running without trouble on shared hosting.

Linode Private Server, Japan datacenter


You should see significant performance improvement on our sites network now. I have been thinking of Amazon web services (AWS) & MediaTemple’s (+ve) hosting for couple of years. But then I found a better service & suitable servers. Name is Linode. Their servers are located all across the US, one in the UK & one in Japan. You get a choice of 6 locations & build your own CDN, setup load-balancing & make a highly scalable setup. You can increase RAM, disc space with a click of a button & get charged on a hourly basis. They’ve been doing cloud before cloud 😉 enough said.

Productivity boost: Rotate the monitor to portrait mode

One of the best productivity hack, I’m fond of is rotating the widescreen monitor into portrait mode.
I highly recommend this on your workstation/ production computer. For media consumption such as watching movies, pictures etc widescreen horizontal display is suited. But if you use the computer for work and content creation (blogs, forums, word, excel, emails/outlook etc) portrait mode would benefit you a lot. Just try it on your regular monitor and see the difference. Let me know about your experience. At first it may be bit awkward but later, I’m sure you’ll find increase in productivity. 🙂

Portrait mode of monitors


Buying Dell’s (swivel, tilt, & pivot/rotation enabled) ultrasharp monitors has been in my wishlist for years. But c’mon! It’s twice the price of regular LCD widescreen. So if you dont want to shell out extra for the flexible stand, you can literally rotate your monitor by 90 deg.