I usually wouldn’t want to post about anything too technical when it comes to the website, but I thought I will mention this, in case someone out there is interested. If not, just skip over this post to get to the next musically-related or otherwise more interesting post.
If you have visited this blog recently, you might have noticed that it went from a somewhat generic theme to complete integration with my prasantmusic.com website. I actually happened upon this while contemplating a switch over to a self-hosted blog using WordPress. I had already installed WordPress on my server, imported my old blogger posts and was playing around with it when I realized that it would take me way too long to figure things out and and potentially make it work with my site. It definitely has much better features as everyone else says on the web, but I’m a musician, not a techie (even though I have often stay up late staring bleary-eyed at the computer, testing little changes in coding), and I just don’t want to spend too much time/effort starting out from scratch. I am a ravenous Googler, like I think everyone has now become, and I found a nifty tutorial on how to integrate an existing hosted Blogger into a normal website. Since I’m familiar with the guts of Blogger template code, I was able to do the integration in a very short time. Anyways, there are a few shortcomings to keeping my old ftp Blogger setup. 1. Archive features are bad. It is very cumbersome to navigate posts through the archives and there is no “older posts” link at the bottom of each page, so navigating the archives is inevitable.2. No integrated search. ** Well a little bit of tweaking and I got a nifty search box for the blog using Google Custom Domain Search, so that is fixed and appears to work well, I might add.
3. No tags, categories etc. There are labels, but no dynamic way to display them.
4. No dynamic “related posts” or “recent posts” features. Of course I could switch over the Google hosted blogspot and get some of these features, but I would really rather host it myself to protect my data, and I would have to use one of the generic themes again. I guess the main thing is that I don’t think too many of you would miss these features too much — would you? Check out the new setup, and let me know if there is anything you find to be too much of a pain or difficult to use. Or perhaps, you have an idea or a feature you would like to see. Let me know! Now, back to listening to Madurai Somu…oh, it just changed to Rage Against the Machine. These shuffle playlists are crazy!
Prasant Radhakrishnan 