I started blogging exactly 4 years back My first post.

I like surprising people. In a good way that is. I like calling them out of the blue, dropping them an email when they are least expecting it or doing something totally unanticipated.

Right now it is 3:00 AM for me and I had to get up to answer nature’s call. And I decided to surprise myself, take myself by shock and do something I have not been able to bring myself to do when fully awake – I decided to blog and so this post

Did I tell you that my body is extra efficient at preserving water – as if I am perpetually stranded in the desert? Did I tell you that I love sipping water all the time – just plain cool water? Combine both of these, especially in a relatively cold country like the US, and you know why I have to go to the loo a zillion and 23 times in a day.

Back to sleep!

I blog because I love words.
I blog because I like talking – ask my friends!
I blog because I like putting my thoughts into words.
I blog because 10 years hence I want to read what I wrote.
I blog because it allows me to play with the CMS, WordPress now, Drupal earlier.

Sometimes I blog to tell friends and family about the stuff going in my life.
Sometimes I blog to confess.
Sometimes I blog to unwind.
Sometimes I blog to talk to my inner demons and to retain my sanity.
Sometimes I blog just to blabber about nothing in particular.

Hmmm… I think that’s about it.

I am blogging after a long time. Almost 4 months since I wrote a proper post.

I came home after work today and was a bit stressed out. I needed to work but before that I had to unwind. I decided to read something. I am reading Atlas Shrugged but I was not in the right frame of mind to enjoy that book so I did not resume reading it. I turned to Slashdot, however my mind refused (gasp!) to take in the green hues, the news for nerds and the stuff that matters. I am usually a very avid follower of my friends’ blogs and I have a blogroll right here in the sidebar so I started clicking one after the other and realized that most of them had not blogged in a while, just like me. Prude also has been bugging me since quite some time to resume blogging and it’s also due to her persistence and insistence that started this chain of thought.

That got me thinking. Of course before I started thinking I shot off emails to my friends asking them why they were not blogging, very typical of me. I am the blogging evangelist in my circle and I had to live up to my unofficial title. OK, so I got thinking. Why the heck was I not blogging? Laziness? Yes. Being busy? Yes. Lack of material? Not at all since life has been full of ups and downs in the recent months (more on that later. Hopefully) and I could have blogged at least 20 times if not more. I guess for me it was just laziness and also wanting to write the “perfect” post.

I have been very lazy and very stupid. Blogging is easy, you just have to take out a sum total of maybe 60 minutes in a week to write 2 posts. And aiming for the perfect blog is idiotic because there is nothing called the perfect post. One just has to write, some posts will be good, some will be terrible. Some will be timepass, some will be memorable.

So dear friends here I am. Back to blogging. And happy about it.

It is 4:00 AM and I am feeling quite sleepy so I will keep this short.

IMPORTANT – Update your feed URLs to the ones mentioned in the footer of the blog.

When I started blogging I had ample free time on my hands. The free time has been steadily decreasing over the months. I love Drupal. It is one of the best web applications I have ever seen. However Drupal is a full-fledged CMS and to use it for an individual blog like mine I had to put in significant effort in taming it. I also had to spend some time at regular intervals upgrading the various modules especially security releases. All this is a bit cumbersome in Drupal, though well worth the effort if you need Drupal’s power. I simply did not have so much time and it always bothered me that my blog was being powered by insecure software. This often prevented me from blogging itself since I would try to put off the blogging till I upgraded the software and that would never happen.

After much hemming and hawing I decided to move to WordPress. Why WordPress? Well… I did not do a whole lot of research, the only other serious contenders being blogger.com and wordpress.com. WordPress seemed simple and powerful enough to me and it is also used by a lot of popular bloggers. It has a very good collection of templates (themes) and also seems to have all the plugins that a blog decides. So without further ado I moved to WordPress.

I also managed to migrate most of the content (posts and comments) from Drupal to WordPress. Alex’s post and script saved me lot of time. The script is not up-to-date and required some tweaks. I could not manage to move the categories and tags and I had to categorize and tag each post manually in my WordPress setup. I will try to include the details in another post.

This theme is WordPress’ default theme. I have checked out a few other good themes and install one of them in the near future. There will of course be a few broken things here and there but I have decided to go with what I have rather than a “big bang” approach. Till then let me know in the comments what you think about the move. Over and out!