Here’s hoping things only get better this year!

Okay, enough excuses. It’s been a long time since I even logged into the control panel. So it wasn’t a surprise when I found that my blog and loads of plugins had been rendered obsolete by the fine folks at WordPress. “Ah well, might as well start the updating”, I thought. A few minutes later, it was all was up to speed.

I proceeded to check the comments section and all I could see were spam comments caught by the trusty Akismet. I wasted no time in deleting them and promptly moved on. Now all that’s left is to cook up something worthy of being published. And that shall come soon, some day in the near future.

That’s it for now, coz I’m off to bed!

I’m a little busy these days, with so many presentations and assignments piling up on my table. As such, my blog won’t be getting as much attention as it needs, although just for a few days. I’ll be back soon; probably this weekend, with my rants and raves.

Till then, you might want to browse through some of my older posts in the Archived section of the site (clicketh on the top-right button, please). Or you might want to do something useful, for a change.

With whatever little time I get these days, it’s much more manageable now. I still need to sort out a few things here and there, but by and large it’s alright. I’ve still continued drawing in class and hopefully I’ll post my collection from the past three months here pretty soon. I’ve been completely out of touch with Photoshop, though. But after sleeping through at least half of the classes, I’ve realized that content is king. So instead of posting frivolous stuff, I think it’s time the blog also grew up and started taking itself a bit more seriously. And maybe that applies to me too.

So from now on, silliness shall be administered in moderation. And for every bit of lunacy there shall be two doses of sanity.

Let’s see how this goes now, shall we? Watch this space.

But don’t hold your breath.

What was that, you ask? Oh, I was just trying to see if the blog is still the way it was when I last visited it. To be honest, I had almost forgotten how it looks. But that had more to do with my constant tinkering with the look of the site, rather than my weak memory.

After more than a month, I’ve finally been able to get myself a thin pipe to the Internet. I’ve shifted base recently and now I’m no longer the free bird who used to while away his time sitting in front of the computer. Yes, I’m seriously busy now and the only time I get for myself is on weekends. And sometimes even that is hard to come by.

So this weekend, I decided to wake up my blog from its slumber and post something, anything. I couldn’t some up with too much, just this little post. But yeah, I’m back alright. And now some of my old readers can waste their bandwidth over here once again.

Oh, and the backgrounds are all a part of my little photography collection, so no infringements there, for a change.

And another thing – this site looks the way it is meant to look, if you use Firefox/Opera. I have not bothered to make it compatible with Internet Explorer, sorry. So if you’re still stuck with IE, do yourself a favour and get Firefox!

Music->Lyrics

A bit dull around here, eh? The steady stream of thoughts that used to flow into this blog has dried up and the only things I’ve posted recently are a few news bits and a cartoon of a cartoon. To liven things up, I’ve made another category called Music->Lyrics. In this little section I will be sharing verses that I find to be exceptional, touching or having a deeper meaning. In other words, it would be like a ‘recommended listening’ thing, if only for the lyrics.

The genres would be diverse, that’s for sure.I’m hoping it would be like a series (now if only I could think of a catchy title) that would be posted every now and then (sorry, can’t guarantee a fixed schedule).

With this update, I’m off to make a list of the first few entries. Cheers!

In my old blog I had a few posts showing off my half-baked Photoshop skills in the form of some wallpapers. You won’t find any wallpapers there now. I decided to create an entirely different section called Digital Art when I restructured the website. It has a gallery, but no option for downloading the images. After a lot of tinkering and trying to somehow put a download link in the Flash gallery, I gave up.

Now, having a separate page for wallpapers when I already have a section called Digital Art, and which would have 90% of the same content as the latter, would look pretty stupid. So I have gone the other way and decided to have a separate category in my blog where I can post downloadable wallpapers for the general public.

This post is like a notice issued before the actual event. The goods will arrive in a separate post, later.

• The site is no longer ‘just a blog’. I wanted to make it a platform for all my future endeavours. The scope for expansion through a blog is limited, in my opinion.
• There are 3 additional sections now, namely Art, Digital Art and Photography. Earlier I used to publish all of my creations in posts under a category. But this time I decided that it would be better to allocate a separate page where I can showcase them. It could have been possible through WordPress, but I decided against it.
• The site is no longer based entirely on WordPress. I wanted to design something that had my unique imprint on it. Designing a WordPress theme was too cumbersome and hardly left a lot of room for experimentation.
• The blog now uses a custom theme, matching perfectly with the look of the rest of the site. That was probably the second most difficult part.
• The most difficult part was deciding on the layout, colours and such. I borrowed ideas and resources from other websites that I had seen and admired, tweaked them, added lots of my own inputs and conjured up something that looks like this.

And most importantly, now I can call this site another one of my own creations. It’s an altogether different feeling to make something from scratch and then watch it running flawlessly (almost).

And before I forget, I’ve also lost most of the links in my blogroll so if any of you were on my list, do tell me so I can add you back! And if you were not on my list earlier, you can be now!

Oh, and another thing. The site is still in BETA, so if you spot any odd behaviour or if something looks out of place, do notify me through the comments or through e-mail.

Cheers!

The past few weeks have been quite an experience. My website went down for 3 whole days. When it finally came back online, the site was looking utterly messed up, with outdated versions of installed plugins and themes. There was no sign of the theme I had tweaked to suit my needs. Instead, I was greeted with a look that I had discarded quite some time ago. I had also lost an entire month’s worth of posts, customizations and settings.

The reason for this unplanned time-travel into the past was that my hosting provider had restored the latest backup he had of my site – which was a month and few days old. And yours truly never backed up his site once, placing all his blogging eggs into one digital basket. Unfortunately my basket err… website was one of the several thousands of websites that were floored by a 0-day vulnerability discovered in HyperVM and duly exploited by malicious minds. You can read more about it here.

Anyways, the damage had been done. I felt that the loss was too much and the blog would never be the same again. So I decided to archive it and start afresh. What followed was a frantic few days deciding what to do and how to do it. After a bit of inspiration and its implementation, this is the new face of aBHi 24×7.

That’s it for now. Explore and see how the site feels like. I’ll be detailing and explaining the logic behind the changes in a subsequent post shortly.