First Post

After struggling almost for a week to find an appropriate domain name for my site I realized how difficult it is to register a name that you want. Finally I settled down with Nirlog.com (Nir=Niranjan & log=weblog) after trying many different crazy combinations. Then had to decide which blog software to use. For most of the people there are quite a lot of choices available e.g they can choose from many of the hosted services or apply for some web hosting package and install the software. But I had only one choice because I wanted to have absolutely 100% control of everything. The server, the software and the content.

After settling with the domain and server I did a small research comparing WordPress and Movable Type, without any doubt WordPress was the winner (easy installation, quick posting without any rebuild, better control of comments and spam, easy to understand code for those who know php, plugins, themes and free of charge). The installation of WordPress in fact took me less than 5 minutes, it’s amazingly easy and fast. I spent some time just reading the WordPress Docs , they’ve excellent collection of documents, tutorials, faqs, themes, plugins and developer guidelines. I was lazy to make my own theme (there are so many excellent themes already available), I’m using the Clasikue theme with little customization. I’ve also added several options to subscribe to my blog (Google, Yahoo, Newsgator and MSN). After this basically I was ready to roll. Final thing I wanted to have was a good blogging client software on my desktop. After reading the comparison of Desktop Blogging Clients, where the author compares BlogJet, ecto, Qumana, w.Bloggar and Thingamablog. I installed w.Bloggar for it has almost all the features as the commercial ones. I’m still testing it though. For this first post however I used Writely. It’s a web based word processor with a cool feature called Blog (Post the document to my blog). That’s about it for my first post and stay tuned more is coming soon…