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).
Vir Das, the comedian, actor in Bollywood has more active and less popular facet that you might not know. Perhaps he’s one of very few people in the film industry who are real, well versed & make sense.
He’s pretty active on social media, so go, follow him!
I’m bit late posting his YouTube video on anxiety about the exam results but I think it’s timeless, so here you go!
So the other day I thought to play around with Tumblr to learn about its services post acquisition. I signed up (from an Indian IP address), to create a new blog and found the place to be lonely. Tumblr offered me some blogs to follow, which I presume are popular. (Something very similar to twitter).
But, I didnt get what was the obvious. The Amitabh Bachchan’s blog is not featured in Tumblr’s suggestion engine. It should have been featured, not only because of his super-stardom celebrity status, but because he’s got a very popular blog. Amitabh Bachchan is one of the most active blogger in India and the world. He’s been blogging regularly, everyday, posted more than 3000 articles for more than 6 years. On the next screen, upon deliberately searching for his blog by typing his name (yes, with spelling mistake, which most of us misspell Bacchan) I found no results. Surprisingly “NO RESULT” for ‘Amitabh Bacchan’. Shame on you, Tumblr!
Amitabh Bachchan, aka SrBachchan had to move from BiggAdda when it discontinued the blogging service. Tumblr ‘won’ Blog of Amitabh Bacchan and migrated old posts & images, when BiggAdda stopped its blogging service.
Tumblr should be grateful that Sr. Bachchan uses its platform for blogging, which otherwise is non-existent in India compared to prominent blogging platform, BlogSpot (& WordPress). Not only this gives free publicity and advertising to the Tumblr but also gives a strong message of recommendation as SrBachchan is using this blogging platform.
Recently, Mr. Bachchan clarified on blog about the 65 crore ‘gold-plated thali’ controversy. & I had a good laugh on how India.com manipulates the stories to create a buzz.
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.
New header, that says I heart WindowsPhone! So cool! I found it on Tendulkar’s blog I liked it, so I immediately downloaded (stole from his blog?) to apply it here.
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…
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.
I’m starting up the new venture. And I’m feeling great about it; well all my past or present projects seem exciting to me but this one is special. The reason is: I am working on a project with my father. It’s about social entrepreneurship. And yes, it’ll be launched on the same website amrute.me! I’ll utilise couple of sub-domains of the site for this project (ah! Do they call it micro-site?)
When I moved from free blogging service, blogger (blogspot.com) to premium blog of wordpress with self hosting website, it was clear that I have to spend money for my publishing pleasures every year. Over the time, my articles writing frequecy reduced marginally and so my Amazon
But this month, I’m finally working on building website. So expect my home office business on its root site. (hey, by the way did you happen to see my home office tour? Things haven’t changed much since Nov 2010. & yeah! Sorry for the accent. 😛 ) In the process, I’ll make some changes in blog- write my unfinished articles, schedule my article-series. link within the network, check some basic SEO, might add book-shelf for Indian viewers who can buy GMAT books from flipkart instead of amazon. All in all I’ll be working majority of my time re-building this website amrute.me; which also includes my social entrepreneurship project.
We have been thinking about launching an informational website related to social entrepreneurship. There’s certainly big gap in the market infact a void space if I dare say & our project could be popular & go big, who know! I’m very excited about it. So stay tuned. You’ll see a lot of changes in & google bots gonna go crazy indexing new pages in coming months 🙂
[continued… partII]
Oh yeah! You heard it right, which means you can expect me blog about GMAT here more often than earlier. Yes, back to blogging but not on forums, so please do not expect prompt (/any) replies on forum if you PM me.
Few additions/changes in blog: You must have noticed Knewton GMAT’s link in the middle column, yes if you’re interested in joining GMAT prep course Knewton is the one I recommend. They’re cheapest yet the best in the town. Go get it.
I seriously want to write resources pages, I hope this time around I get more time for this site to add some content.
I also have GMAT FAQ queued up 😉 they’re somewhere around 75 frequently asked questions I would featured in this blog & try to answer clear, short & simple way. I might post them twice a week, maybe. Although I’m not sure when would I start posting it but as I would, I know I may end up writing infinite no. of FAQ posts … so I should stop myself at 75. All in all, expect this blog to be regularly updated with fresh content.
In filling some form I was asked to write a brief bio about me… I really liked what I’d written there. So I am sharing it here. I never wrote seriously about me anyways so here it goes….
Pranav juggles many roles at a time. He is engineer by profession and has setup a bootstrap startup engineering firm with his friends. While staying at village, believing in decentralisation philosophy, he looks after his retiring father’s fabrication workshop and agricultural farm.
He’s webmaster by hobby and blogs about GMAT and general stuff occasionally. His interest lies in social enterprises, government schemes/initiatives for social change, ^going green^, magazines and internet (& yes! web 2.0). In past time he designs/makes useful articles by re-using useless trash. follow him on twitter @johnycage
Man! am I getting self-obsessed? or have already become one? 😛
I’m going to drive more than 300 km tomorrow on motorbike. Well! it’s not that I am doing it for the first time. I’m sure my last scooter journey was longer than tomorrow’s. But this time it’s gonna be different. Firstuff: I’m blogging about it; I’m on motorbike CD-100 & not on my scooter; I’m not alone, yes I’m going with my Dad.
Following map has our journey details and remarks.
View My trip to Pune, Kisan exhibition. in a larger map
Hello dear subscribers,
here’s a quick update -=->
(This blog post is especially made for those who read my blog through feed reader such as Google reader, bloglines, my yahoo, MS Outlook, or Linux akregator etc. For rest of you, just ignore the post. Thank you.)
I am deactivating Feedburner, a feed manager/ distributor service from Google. If you subscribed to my blog recently that is in last 6-8 months, chances are you’ve automatically subscribed me via feedburner url. In that case please change my feed url to simple n straight feed://http//pranav.amrute.me/feed/
I think it’s wise to switch back to basics, also I think it’s bit annoying seeing adsense ads in your RSS feeds. So I’ve removed it. No adds on feeds 🙂
If you want GMAT specific articles, simply click on that right cartoon sitting on the bench.
Although dont panic, if you dont understand a word here; this post wasn’t even necessary. But WTH! Following figure will help you understand & google will take care of rest.
I haven’t updated you guys since long, I know. But I want to let you k now that I’m online, active & alive. Just that blogging is too time consuming in this jet-age. so I more often do micro-blogging rather than updating this blog. As you can notice on this site itself you can follow my tweets and connect me via facebook.
That doesn’t mean that end of this blog or website, but I’d add posts here when I have something significant to say. In fact I’m in the process of adding many static pages to blog. Notice resources, & GMAT books recommendation pages? they are in html, I’ll add them in this blog and also, many other resourceful webpages in pipeline.
On personal front: We’ve got new puppy (male dog). He’s cute & looks just like fantya, the dog we had 10-15 years back. I named him twitter. For naming actually I used the social media. Asked this question on Gtalk status, orkut etc & got tons of responses….(Ah now I feels like Chris Pirillo 😛 ). My cousin suggested that name & I really liked it. So I’m not acting like a zombie anymore. yep check profile page to know my current hobby/habits/interests 😉
On Amrute’s website front: I’ve just renewed my domain to year 2012. So we dont have to bother much about those issues now. Also I just had shoutout at Amrute orkut community to invite amrute to this website. So I expect some signups as well. 🙂
On beat the GMAT front: yes, Eric & David are fine tuning the website & new revamped website will be open by this weekend, 15 Nov. For time being you can check getting started at Beat the GMAT page.
~Enjoy~
I merged my all blogs and made my GMAT strategy blog pretty diluted. I was aware of the loss I would face but I had to do it in order to make it simple. After the consolidation, my only concern was that I should at least give my visitors who come only for GMAT news the GMAT specific RSS feed. So that they dont have to subscribe to my non-sense posts.
There’s simple way to stay away from irrelevant posts of any wordpress blog or follow only specific topics. All you need is adding ‘/feed’ to its category. That means, if you want to follow my marathon related posts only, you can simply subscribe to https://pranav.amrute.me/topic/marathon/feed
But if you’re not sort of techie, you probably would have ended up subscrbing whole blog. Well, I’m sorry that I didn’t post it before, it’s something that I should have mentioned first after merging other blogs with GMAT stuff. Anyways, on the right column can you see cartoon of the man seating on the bench reading my RSS feed? OK, now I’m changing it’s Feeds url to GMAT specific topics. So if you follow that man, you’ll get GMAT articles on your PC, without having to visit my site! (And this feed will be ad free! so enjoy the man seating on bench!)
If you’re a regular visitor or even visited this blog in past at least once/twice, you’d notice that I have changed my blog’s name from Beating GMAT & beyond.
As you might know this blog is inspiration from Beat The GMAT blog & I liked its title too, infact it was the title of that blog that attracted me on the first look! Sigh!! it’s 2005 I am talking about! & when I thought of making a GMAT related blog I want something similar name yet I wanted to address beyond GMAT topics as well. Hence the name 🙂
Now you can guess where we’re heading… yeah since I moved this blog from blogger to wordpress (& my personal domain/website.) I’ve made it clear that this blog is not gonna be ‘only GMAT specific’ but I’d add some other stuffs along with my personal updates.
“Johny Learns to Blog” was my signature (yeah MLTR is my fav. you have problem? 😉 ) in one of the online forums later I must have changed it as I dont remember now where I’d used that line.
Now I’m in dilemma as should I use my real name? instead of Johny? It’ll be then “Pranav Learns To Blog” hows that sound?
leave a comment & tell me. Is JLTB is OK or should it be PLTB?