After reading different threads on wordpress.org and unsuccessfully trying all kinds of fixes, I came across one fix which suggested that the problem could be solved by adding a line to wp-config.php.  (Specifically,   you should add define('CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS', false);)

Except, I had no idea where wp-config.php was.  I opened Filezilla and tried to connect to my hosting provider, something I hadn’t done in years.  Of course I had forgotten the password.

After a few unsuccessful tries, I figured out the password, but Filezilla still would not connect. That turned out to be a firewall issue, so I had to fix that.

Finally, I located wp-config.php and added the line, and voila, my blog’s editor was back to normal!  Yes, I could finally get started on my post!

As if on cue, S started to bawl.  She was hungry. Or sleepy. Or both.  My window of bloggability had just closed for the day.

Time was when my absence from my blog could be explained very simply as laziness.  Nothing has changed since then – I still don’t blog frequently, but the excuses have become more complicated.

Desi Pundit is not alone.  Last week, Ultrabrown decided to close shop too.  At this rate, I wonder which other group blog’s turn it will be next week.  It’s not just group blogs even. Dozens of bloggers I follow have either decided to stop blogging, take a break from blogging, or are posting very infrequently.  (Yes, I know, I am also guilty of mysteriously absenting myself from my blog every now and then).

Part of this perhaps has to do with the demographics of the early bloggers – many bloggers I read started blogging when they were in school and had some measure of free time.  As they became older, the pressures on their time have increased – whether it’s because of work, longer commutes, marriage, children or a combination of all of this – and inevitably, blogging has taken a back seat.

Other bloggers have graduated from blogs to writing books and so update their blogs less frequently.  Still others are perhaps disenchanted with the drop (in recent times) in blog readers and commenters.  After all,  although every blogger starts off with a need to voice his/ her opinion, comments from readers are the oxygen that keeps one going.

There is also the issue of having competing avenues to express yourself.  Once upon a time, there were only blogs. Now you have Twitter and Facebook updates and any number of other means to comment about articles you’ve read or comment about news events.  Too often, it isn’t necessary to write a long blog post because you’ve already said your piece in 140 characters or less.

As I see it, the desi / Indian blogosphere is at the crossroads.  The old guard is now giving way to a new generation of bloggers.  At DP, we have linked up posts in the past that were written by bloggers in their teens (and some who are barely older). Perhaps some of them will start a group blog (and perhaps they already have).  These are the bloggers who are going to blog enthusiastically for the next few years. These are the blogs I should start reading now. If you know of any such blogs, please send me a link and I will add them to my feed reader.

Of course, there is the question on whether the nature of blogging itself will change over the next few years.  I hope that doesn’t happen.  While Twitter and Facebook are great for immediate responses, there is nothing like a thoughtful and well-analyzed blog post.

As for Desi Pundit, Patrix said it best:

Over at DesiPundit, people have moved on to other things and time & resources haven’t been as plentiful for those who have remained. The Indian blogosphere and presence on other social media networks has expanded greatly and in our experience, it is no longer possible for human-powered aggregators to keep up; at least on a part-time volunteer basis.

He’s right, of course.  Still, my fondest memories are those of my early days as a blogger and a DP Contributor, when I used to trawl through hundreds of blogs, trying to discover a new blogger or an interesting post.  What I discovered then was that the Indian blogosphere is still very much in its infancy – the number of high-quality blogs that can appeal to a general audience (i.e. not just family) is rather low considering the millions of Internet users in our cities.  And yet, its amazing how much this small group of people have been able to achieve and the attention they have received from the mainstream media.

So while I am really sad to see group blogs die (and especially Desi Pundit, given my association as a Desi Pundit Contributor and Community Member), I wonder if it is just one more event in the growing up process of the Indian blogosphere.

They are all spam comments (of course, what else can I expect?).  Akismet correctly recognizes them nearly all the time, but occasionally, it lets a few slip by.  Maybe it knows how much I like readers’ comments (and how few of them I get).  Here’s a sample of the spam love I get, and note the .in web addresses of the authors.

Sample of Spam Love

So I wasn’t too surprised to read this article in the Hindu about how India is the second top spam generating country in the world.  This is based on a study by Sophos, and you can see the list on their website here.

Over at SpamHaus, they have a list of the top 10 worst spammers, and who do you think makes it all the way to #3?  Someone called Herbal King from India.

Pic: Spamhaus

You cannot imagine how happy it makes me to see Indians succeeding in one more IT related area.

Has any of you also noticed a sudden increase in spam-comment love on your blogs from .in websites?

I read your blog post on “bloggers and tweeters” with great interest, for I am also one of those people who blog and tweet.   You do both too, I notice, and some may think it is ironic that your own views were in the form of a blog post.  But perhaps you believe that blogging should only be done by journalists?

Let me introduce myself – I am one of those pseudonymous bloggers you mentioned, you know, blogging from the darkness of my room in my ivory tower.

You ask about me  and other anonymous bloggers :

I will wonder: just who do you guys represent? Are you speaking on behalf of viewers and readers? Or are you just another anonymous elite that feels emboldened to pass judgement on the rest of the world from the darkness of your rooms?

Perhaps you don’t understand this, but I speak for just myself and no one else.  I have not been elected by any one to represent them or their views.  What’s more, I am not even a self-appointed representative; I don’t delude myself that I speak for some silent majority of people who may or may not agree with me.  I didn’t even realize I needed to be “emboldened” to blog, is speaking out something that should fill me with fear ?

You defend the media obsession with TRPs by saying:

When bloggers tell you that TV channels are only interested in TRPs, what are they saying?

In effect, they are saying that TV channels are only interested in reaching as many people as possible.

And why is this a bad thing?

and also

Or, look at it another way. If a programme gets high TRPs, then this means that lots of ordinary people have liked it. The ordinary people may be right or wrong to have liked it – I pass no value judgements here – but the fact that they liked it is a reflection on them, not on the TV channel. So, why blame the channel? Why not blame the viewers?

Did I read that right? The light may be dark here, but  Mr. Sanghvi, are you really saying that any programme with high TRPs (or potentially high TRPs) is fit to be broadcast?

If so, here are a few categories of content that will get very high TRPs.  Celebrity gossip sells – I mean rumors, paparazzi pictures, speculation about “famous” people and so on.   Another category that is very popular among some people – porn.  Soft porn, suggestive photos, lingerie clad models – these are very popular in a certain segment.  But you don’t have to take my word for it;  I don’t claim to speak for your audience.

But tell me, Mr. Sanghvi, if your audience research suggests that celebrity gossip and soft-porn will  increase your TRPs, will you include them in your programming?  If adding hard porn and graphic violence will help you tap yet another segment and increase your TRPs even more, will you add them too?  Please tell me, I would be very interested in your answers.

I believe that the news media’s job is to educate and not to titillate, but again, that is just my personal opinion.  You are free to disagree.

You also say:

Such is the arrogance of the blogging elite these days that even when it attacks journos, it is effectively dissing the vast majority of media readership and viewership.

I’m sorry, Mr. Sanghvi, but sitting in my darkened room, I didn’t realize that attacking journos is equal to attacking readers.  I suppose then, by the same logic, attacking politicians is equal to attacking the voters who voted for them?  Maybe you should stop saying anything against any elected representative then – you don’t want to disparage voters, do you?

Perhaps you should darken your room too, Mr. Sanghvi, the light is blinding.

Other opinions on the topic :  Amit Varma, Rohit.

Most of us abandon the theme because we think it’s too difficult to change colors.  For those of us who have never done any CSS editing (or, for that matter, any coding whatsoever), it seems an uphill task  – and even a little scary.

It’s really not difficult at all – take it from someone who has no CSS editing knowledge whatsoever.  Change the colors in your theme is ultimately as simple as cutting and pasting.

Why do people change the color of their theme ?

1.  Color Preference: I keep coming across anecdotal studies that say blue is the most popular color in the internet.  Certainly most websites have a lot of blue in them, and a lot of text is in blue – whether it’s bolded newspaper headlines or hyperlinks.

But not everyone likes blue – I like green, for instance.  While choosing themes, I found myself instinctively attracted to themes that had green in them, even if they didn’t have the features I was looking for.

2. Readability: Black backgrounds are harder on the eye and are not as reader-friendly as white backgrounds.

3. Color Co-ordination : If you are using a custom header image,  you don’t want theme colors that clash with the header image.  Taking it a step further, you can even build a website so all colors share a common palette.

4.  Uniqueness : If everyone had the same default color template of the theme, then how is your website going to stand out?

Photo courtesy:  cdharrison

A Step by Step guide to changing the color of your theme:

Step 1.  Figure out the colors you want your website to have.

Go over every part of your blog/ website.   Make a list of each part and what color you’d like it to have.  For instance – ‘highlighted text – dark blue’, ‘post header – black’, ‘comments background – white’ and so on.   This should speed up the process when you get down to the actual changing. Usually, it might boil down to just noting the parts/ colors in your  selected theme that you don’t like.

Then you get to the colors you’d like to have.  There are a few ways of going about this.  One is to try to color co-ordinate your website, keeping all colors in your blog in the same palette.  This may work for people who have a static custom header or a logo.  Say your logo is a crimson rose with a green leaf, and you want font colors to be the same shade of the leaf, and highlighted text to be crimson.  Think of this as the virtual equivalent of coordinating the curtains with the furniture or wall paint.   It’s surprisingly easy to do, too.

The other way is the path that most of us follow – we know which colors we want things to be – say blue or black or green, but we don’t know which specific shade.  Sometimes we like a color we see in another blog or website, and we’d like to use the same shade.

Step 2 : Get the hex codes.

There are lots of tools available that can give you hex codes for every shade under the sun.  Search for “html color code” or ‘hex color code” and you’ll find hundreds of color charts and color wheels and so on.  Here is one, for instance.

- If you are going the color coordination route, then you can use a tool like Color Palette generator. You can upload your blog header/ logo/ other image  to the website, and it will break down the various colors in it and give you their hex codes.  You can then use those codes to create a palette of your own.

- If you see a color you like on another blog/ website and want to use the same one,  there are color picker tools available that will get you the code (hex code/ html/ red, green, blue values, any way you want).  I used Instant Eyedropper, which was quite good.  Just mouse over to that color and the eyedropper will tell you the hex code.

- If you want to see how different colors will look beside each other, you can use something like this Color Combo Tester.

Step 3 :  Edit the stylesheet

Now that you know which colors you want your blog to have and the hex codes for them, it’s a simple matter of plugging in the new values in the stylesheet.  For most themes, you can edit the stylesheet directly through your WordPress dashboard under Appearance ->Editor. WordPress automatically opens the Stylesheet when you click “editor”, but if not, you can find it under Theme files – look for Style.css.

Some other themes use a different CSS file.  This could be default.css or some other named file – check in your theme documentation.  You may also not be able to access this through the WordPress Dashboard but may need to login to your hosting service and  open the file using the code editor.

First, back up style.css (or default.css or whatever it’s called).  You can do this by copying and pasting the entire text to a text file in your computer.  Or, you can create an online backup by saving the file under a new name – say olddefault.css.

Once you’ve done that, all you need to do is edit style.css .   This is a simple matter of going to the relevant section – header, or sidebar, and so on, and replacing the appropriate hex code with the code of the color you want to use.   By now, you should be able to recognize a hex code – it ‘s a combination of letters and numbers and looks something like say, #70FF70 or #8C8984.    Just cut and paste the code of the color you have chosen.

Most of us – personal bloggers or those of us with non- “super busy” websites can easily use trial and error.  Plug in a color and if you don’t like the way it looks on your website, change to a different color.

Make sure you are not deleting any other text apart from the color codes.  But even if you delete a few other lines of code by mistake, all you need to do is delete the entire text, copy and paste the original stylesheet text and start all over again.

Cutting and pasting text – isn’t that something even a newbie can do?

After the 4th or 5th inquiry about adding a custom banner header (and after noticing how many Google searchers come to my blog every day looking for a way to customize the Arras header), I have decided to write a post explaining how to add a custom header, and also how to achieve a look like mine – which looks more like a bigger logo than a custom header.

All this info (though probably not in this detail) is also available in the Arras theme forums, but you will have to spend some time hunting for it.

Uploading a Custom Header

Step 1: Create a custom header. If you want a banner header, make sure the dimensions are 960 x 150 pixels.

Step 2: Upload the header. You can do this 2 ways – (a) use wordpress’s media upload feature to upload, or (b)upload it through your hosting service to the same folder as the theme’s existing header image. If you are using option (b), you should upload it to /public_html/wp-content/themes/arras-theme/images/icons.

It doesn’t really matter which folder you use. Just remember that if you are uploading it to your theme folder and you delete the theme in future, the header file will also get deleted, so keep a backup.

Step 3: Modify the CSS file. Unfortunately, you cannot do this through the theme editor within WordPress. You will have to login to your web hosting service and edit the code through your hosting service’s editor (or download it and edit it – you don’t really need DreamWeaver to edit, just Notepad should do it).

You have 2 options here too – you can modify the default stylesheet, or create a new stylesheet, leaving the default one as it is. You can do this because Arras has the option of creating a new stylesheet – users.css, which overrides the default stylesheet.

If you are going to modify the default stylesheet (like me), then make sure you save a copy of the old stylesheet. You can download it to your computer, and also save a copy online (rename it as default-old.css). You will find the default.css file in this folder – /public_html/wp-content/themes/arras-theme/css/styles.

If you’d rather leave default.css alone, then copy all the text in default.css into users.css and start editing users.css. You will find users.css in this folder – /public_html/wp-content/themes/arras-theme/css.
Arras will automatically start using users.css.

The CSS modifications are minimal, and very simple. These are the changes you need to make :

Comment line 72. (i.e. add /* and */ respectively before and after the text)

Uncomment line 73 (i.e. remove the /* and */) and include link to your uploaded custom header.

Comment line 74

It will now look something like this:

/*.blog-name a:link, .blog-name a:visited { color: #FFF; text-decoration: none; }*/
.blog-name a:link, .blog-name a:visited { text-indent: -9000px; background: url(../../images/icons/your_logo.jpg) no-repeat; width: 960px; height: 150px; display: block;}
/*.blog-name a:link, .blog-name a:visited { text-indent: -9000px; background: url(../../images/icons/logo.png) no-repeat; width: 450px; height: 22px; display: block; }*/

Here, your_logo.jpg is the custom header you have uploaded. If you have uploaded using WordPress’s media uploader, make sure to change the path to your uploaded location.

Don’t panic if the line numbers are off by a few numbers. I know the latest theme version has some changes. Basically, look in the /*header*/ section.

Uploading a Custom Sized Logo

What if you don’t want a banner header, but just a larger sized logo? You’ll notice that the default theme only allows a 450×22 sized logo, which might be too small for some.

One way is to edit line 74 to make the logo sized larger – say 450×150 or whatever you want.

My solution to that was to create a banner header with the same background color as the header background.

To change the header background color, go to line 68:

/* header */
#header { background: #e0e0e0; border-bottom: 5px solid #d0d0d0; padding: 0 0 0px 0; }

The #d0d0d0  is the gray you see in my header. You can change it to whatever color you’d like.

But I still did have to customize the theme.  For one thing, I wanted green instead of blue.  I wanted to have my own custom header image, I wanted to change the default font and of course the colors.  It should have been simple, and it is, but it’s incredibly time-consuming.  It would be much faster if you knew exactly which shade you wanted for each area of the site, but if you go through the trial-and-error method, it takes a lot of time. As it was, I was obsessively tweaking all weekend.

This is how the theme actually looks like if you use it without any customization :

There were a few hiccups along the way, like the tabbed sidebar widget which insisted on destroying my entire layout when viewed in IE.  But most of them were resolved by digging though the forum archives, though that did take some time as well.

Most of the changes I needed could be done by editing the stylesheet, but there were some (like Sujatha’s idea of removing the text excerpt from the slideshow) which actually involved editing php files.

The customized theme, as you cannot help noticing, is green.  But is it easy on your eyes?  Would most of you rather prefer blue  (just in terms of readability) ?  I hope you will answer these and other questions in the poll below.  Please don’t limit yourself to just the poll – I’d really appreciate detailed comments /critiques.

**Polls closed.**

There are Free magazine-style themes, and there are Premium (read paid) themes, and then there are the so-called “Freemium” or Free Premium themes. The Premium themes have a simple proposition – they are (usually) more professional- looking, easily customizable with lots of theme options, and you get theme support if you run into any problems or want help on customizing something.

Shefaly recommended the Thesis theme, which she uses on her professional blog. It’s a nice, clean theme, though I wondered if it was too clean for me, and I noticed that Shefaly had needed outside help on customization.

Atahualpa Theme

Thesis is one of the most popular themes available, and there are some widely-read bloggers who use the theme, and a near-cult following.  But there is a debate going on whether Thesis is really the best theme out there.  I found that at least one WordPress theme designer – Mayank thinks that Atahualpa is better than Thesis.

Atahualpa is a terrific theme by any standard.  It has 2 dozen option pages (really) and free support.  If I hadn’t been looking for a news-style theme rather than a blog style theme, Atahualpa would have been my first choice.

Atahualpa options page titles

Two Magazine styled themes with theme-options pages are Isotherm news and Igloo News. Jaypee Habaradas has a nice review of Isotherm News where you can see a snapshot of the options page.

One theme I really loved was Hybrid News.  It is a free theme, and its developer Justin Tadlock even had a long rant about premium WordPress themes and how he would not be entering the pay-for-use theme market. I downloaded and installed Hybrid News – it’s a little more complicated than others because it’s really a child theme of the Hybrid Theme, and because it has any number of layout styles and accompanying php files, and just a single, woefully inadequate options page.

Now, I have learnt to do simple stylesheet CSS customization – changing fonts, colors, headers and even widths (of sidebar, header etc). But changing php files is something I hesitate to do, and in this case it was even more complicated by the sheer abundance of php files the theme had.

So I looked for theme support, and what did I find? You need a paid subscription to sort out any issues. Now how is that any different from having a premium theme? To me, this seemed like a bait-and-switch way of doing the same thing that other developers are upfront about.

The irony is that theme support does not even have to come from the theme developer – the support forums are mainly a place where people help each other out and also showcase their customizations. In fact, the support forums are where, as a developer, you can see all the bugs in your theme.

So I can see more rationale for a developer to charge for the theme than for supporting it.  And besides, I would rather spend the money on a fully customizable theme than have to hang out in the support forums hoping to get the developer (or someone else) to troubleshoot my blog.

What theme do you think I ended up choosing?  How do you like it?

Those online searchers weren’t the only ones reading my old posts. I ended up reading my old recipe posts too – starting with the gulab jamun post, to see how I had made it last year and the mistakes I had made. Reading the post (and especially the comments that followed it) turned out to be a great idea – I could make even better gulab jamuns this year. But more than that, reading the post made me nostalgic.

We may think of a personal blog as just an online diary, but it is more than that. In terms of revealing our thoughts, it is obviously better than the other ways we keep our memories – like pictures or videos. Even if we kept diaries/ journals, we wouldn’t have as long entries as our blog posts tend to be.

But the key difference between a personal blog and all those other memory records is – the blog is interactive. So when I was re-reading my old recipe posts, I could also see others’ perception of it. In fact, I found the comments (and my responses) quite revealing.

When you throw in the Johari window concept and others like it, having a blog does seem a great way to bring about self-awareness and possibly self-improvement. I wonder why more psychiatrists don’t recommend it – shouldn’t we be seeing a slew of “therapy blogs”? Or does that category already exist?

For my part, I don’t know if my blog has helped in my self-improvement, but it has certainly brought about gulab jamun-improvement

Happy Diwali/ Deepavali to all of you!