Raju Alluri’s Personal Blog

A bit of cleanup related to my web presence over the weekend. One of my coworkers asked me to tryout a new Facebook application. That led to:

• Cleaning up of my facebook settings
• Adding more friends on facebook
• Installing and configuring twitter on my blackberry
• Making sure that my blog RSS feed is read by Facebook Notes application
• Cleaning up of my personal mail accounts on my personal domain
• Cleaning up of unused subdomains on my personal domains

My first blog post from my blackberry. All is well, except scrolling within the wdgets. For example, I can’t scroll through my list of categories to choose one.

Media and Blogs: who precedes whom in news coverage? This article discusses several findings related to how the traditional news houses publish information faster than the blogoshpehere.

And they lived happily ever after, tweeting. [ I really loved the line: “I can’t wait to see ….” ]

Alec indicated yesterday that he separating with Sun. After about 17 years.

While I was at Sun, he is very patient in answering all my stupid questions on security. I bet he stored all my internal chat sessions somewhere in a jokes folder.

Thanks Alec, thanks for your patience and thanks for dropsafe. Wish you a nice break and a much nicer next venture.

Last weekend, facebook started offering direct profile URL and there is a mad rush to get these URLs. In a wink (actually dueing my lunch) I lost opportunity to grab the direct URL for my daughter’s profile. Got one for me though!

Moved this site to a new hosting provider overnight. Have  been evaluating various options for a while, but didn’t get enough time to act on that. Last weekend, I chose the hosting provider and did a staging site on that with another domain I own.

The biggest challenge is moving the blog. I wanted to go with a wordpress upgrade as part of the move. So I had to really test the blog’s data migraiton and upgrade. I played a bit with the MySQL tables and trimmed the database. My older version of akismet was not good enough to clean up the spam from wordpress interfaces, so I had to manually do some SQL queries to get rid of the spam messages. About 2000 of them. The newer version of akismet on this site is very current and better usable.

Let me first go through  the staging site setup. I installed a fresh blog with the desired version of wordpress. I made it a point that the MySQL table names are same (the database name is different though.)  Then I slightly modified the SQL queries and ensured that all the legacy data is copied over to the new tables. Once the tables are populated, it required a fresh run of the upgrade script from wordpress to make the blog sync with the old data. To make sure that the staging site doesn’t mess up with the original blog, I had to change some parameters in the MySQL tables (like the blog home and base URL etc.) I also did a manual edit of the UTF-8 blog content. The old version of my blod didn’t support SQL export in UTF-8.

Setting up the staging site is very easy because the name servers for the staging site are setup well in advance and the A records are populated well before the staging site setup. Migrating the production blog is not that easy.
For migrating the production blog, I started with creating a new blog installation on the new server. The database from the older server is migrated, but the post migration upgrade phase had some issues because the DNS is still resolving to the old server. So I fired up a virtual machine which had a local resolution of the website names to the new server. From there, I completed the setup part of it.

As part of the migration, I also upgraded my themes and switched to Mandigo. Next weekend, I can spend some time on customizing it.

Why should I migrate  to a new switching provider? The answer is long enough for a separate blog post.

Markets tumbling. Brokers in distress. Hands on their faces. Blog Here.

Finally, the long silence from Jonathan, the avid blogger, is broken. Aug 08 is a month in which he didn’t post a single blog entry. Very unusual. Today, after a silence of about 38 days, he posted a new blog entry. Welcome back, Jonathan!

This week, I checked out ibibo, a social networking site targeted primarily towards India’s netizens. At first, I thought that this is similar to facebook, but later found some key differences.

• ibibo depends heavily on pre-cooked applications (blogs, photos, polls, yada, yada) and facebook has a rich set of user or group contributed applications.
• facebook gives you a feel of being event driven and ibibo gives you a feel of conversation/content driven, mostly due to blogs, questions and polls.
• facebook seems to be exploring an individual’s prior contacts, but ibibo’s contact building (at least for now) seems to be pretty random.

I haven’t explored ibibo much (yet), but there are already a few positive things I can tell, when compared to other community/networking sites.

• Their photo uploading interface is lot better. You can upload a single photo at a time using the “browse” selection or launch a Java applet to upload a large number of photos at once. This works fine on all platforms including Linux and OpenSolaris, making life easy for power sharers. I am usually irked when I have to upload lot of photos at once to other photo sharing sites from a Unix based desktop.
• The account comes with built in blog interface. I am surprised to see a bunch of frequent bloggers. There is a bloggers hall of fame!
• Lot of applications are tuned to Indian scenarios (like searches and polls based on India current affairs, location specific Q&A, etc.) For example, a question like “How do I reach Taj Banjara Hotel in Hyderabad?”. India’s maps or search engines are not yet detailed enough for answering such questions.

Overall, this is a site worth exploring, especially if you are in India or know the Indian scenarios.