Clazh » Blogging

Reborn, Resurrected, Relaunched, Reloaded, Redesigned

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:15:48 +0000

So here we are at last, more than a year has gone by since I left this blog in limbo. To kick-start my blogging again I decided to redesign and re-brand the blog. As I mentioned in my previous post I am currently working as a freelance Web/UI designer for the last 10 months or so. So after an year and a half of procrastination, I present you the all new Clazh Technology and Design. Expect me start blogging regularly from now on. I am also advertising my skills as a web designer, very soon I will be selling a some really cool WordPress themes and templates so watch out. A lot of exciting things have happened in the last one year, I hope to keep that momentum going.

About the new design.

Well this is the longest time I have ever taken to design something, the design went through more than 40 revisions, it was partly my fault since kept putting it in the back burner and every time I brought it up to work on I would change something. I happy with the overall look and design. I know its not as colorful as my last one. The pink color in my last design became a running joke among my friends. Currently the site is still in beta.

Running on the latest and best WordPress 2.8.
Very Lightweight.
Uses only one image for the whole site, CSS Sprites.
All Javascript are hosted on External CDN
New featured content slider on the homepage.
New community submitted articles.

Please do provide some feedback, will really appreciate it. If something is broken get in touch with me using the contact form. Lots more new stuff coming up on the site just keep a watch.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Web-Design Tags: Blogging, Web-Design, Wordpress

Back from the dead

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:23:49 +0000

Its going to be almost a year since I have blogged. Its time to get back to blogging and revive this blog again. Lot of things have been happening on my side. 2008 was one the best and worst year of my life, personally and career wise. A few things I would like to highlight are.

I was awarded the Microsoft MVP Most Valuable Professional.
I quit my IT Job at the software company I was working at.
I switched to a Mac, I brought a mac book pro 15′.
I been backpacking and traveling. Bhutan, Dubai, Goa, Kodaikanal etc.
I been doing volunteer work here and there.

So whats next.

Start blogging again.
Revamp the site and design.
Start Freelancing as a web designer and developer.
Lots more backpacking and traveling.

If you’ve been a long time reader, my apologies for the neglect. Do let me know what you like to see on this blog, and how we can improve it further.

Notable Free Premium WordPress Themes

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:59:03 +0000

Time for showcasing a few notable Free Premium Quality WordPress Themes that caught my eye. With a little a bit of creativity and extra work you could modify these themes to get yourself a free high quality theme.

LeoPress Leopard Inspired WordPress Theme

LeoPress is a free three column WordPress. The design is inspired by Mac OSX Leopard.

Download Link: Here

Preview: Here

Lemon Twist

A green coloured two column WordPress theme from farfromfearless. Theme was developed for the authors own site and later release to the public to download. The panels in the side block are collapsible, it also has a large footer in the front page to showcase your flickr images and latest posts.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Probama WordPress Theme

A politically inspired theme supporting Barack Obama. The home page is a two column WordPress theme with a large footer, for single posts and pages the layout switches to a single column layout. The menu supports sub pages and are shown as drop down lists.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Neoclassical Three Column WordPress Theme

This a clean Three column WordPress theme with great typography.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Massive Mobile

If you want to display your site or blog in a more user friendly way on the iPhone or PSP you can make use of this free theme.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Free, Templates, Themes, Web-Design

Shared Hosting Sucks Moved To Dedicated Virtual

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:13:46 +0000

My apologies since its been a while since I posted on this blog. My real life took over my online life, hence I was unable to dedicate anytime to this blog. A number of interesting events took place over the web while I was away. Notably Apple release the new and refreshed line of Mac Book Pros that I had been waiting for. I am currently waiting for them to appear on the Apple India Store before I can purchase one.

Shared Hosting Really Sucks

I while back I recommended bluehost, since their uptime and response time is comparably better than other shared web hosting providers even better than Media Temple overrated Grid Servers. I would like to withdraw my good opinion about them, after they banned my site without giving me a reason. I had to contact tech support to ask them the reason why they had banned me. The reason they gave me turned out to be a really dumb one, according to them I had violated there TOC by posting about a security flaw in myspace and mind you this offending article is more than a year old. I knew they were just looking for a reason to ban me since my site takes up a lot of bandwidth.

Shared hosting sucks for a number of reasons.

There are too many Websites crammed onto a single server.
You don’t have control over the server resources and application.
You are rarely given root/SSH access.
Most shared hosts are slow and put restriction on your CPU Usage. My site has show the CPU exceeded error a number of time.

Since my site has grown and deserves much better. The first thing that I did was to purchase a basic Dedicated Virtual Hosting package from Media Temple. I am totally loving the huge increase in performance and response time. My Pingdom account shows that the average response time for the site has dropped below 1 sec unlike the previous 1.5 – 3 sec.

Since MT Dedicated Virtual Hosting is too expensive for me. I did a lot of research into Dedicated Virtual Hosting and finally settled on Slicehost. While I am not a Linux guru I don’t mind getting my hands dirty so currently I am busy teaching myself how to setup a Linux Box from scratch. I plan to run this site on a combination of Lighttpd, MySql, and PHP called a LLMP setup. Expect this site to load 10 times faster than before.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Open Source, Technology Tags: Web-Hosting

Yes WordPress Is Blog Not A CMS Get Over It

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:48:18 +0000

I’ll repeat it WordPress is not a CMS, its a Blog. Its a different issue that it is flexible enough to be used as a CMS. The reason I am using it is because I want a blog not a CMS and I love it because because its the best Blogging software out there. If you want a example of CMS Software then checkout Joomla or Drupal I fail to see what all the brouhaha is about. So we have a small time competing product built on Microsoft technology marketing itself as better than WordPress anything wrong with that? pointing to C-NET, the New York Times, Ford as examples is inaccurate, they use WordPress mostly for their blogs and do you think they are running the default WordPress setup? The codebase might be WordPress but they would have hired a bunch of developers to modify WordPress and extend it. I read through Graffiti’s marketing pitch and I don’t find anything overtly offensive or controversial with regard to WordPress.

Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform and better tools. So for developers familiar with ASP.NET its full power and capability are available to you.

Those are the words from their site. They don’t seem to bashing PHP directly or too much.

I particularly like the comment below by Ian

Hello folks, greetings from “the dark side”!

I have never tried WordPress but at first glance it appears to be fond of MySQL and PHP, both of which make my stomach turn.

Are you suggesting that I should migrate across to an unfamiliar platform in deference to using a solution which runs on my favoured “stack” of Windows, SQL Server, and ASP.NET? Or are you just taking issue with their advertising message? Iâ€™m not being facetious or rhetorical, Iâ€™m genuinely curious.
Personally speaking, I have found this early beta release of Graffiti to be an excellent CMS platform and more than adequate for my requirements of a personal blogging platform on the MS stack.

Best wishes,
Ian

So would anyone like to point out to me how PHP is technically better than ASP.NET. Both Technologies have there advantages and disadvantages. The only reason why ASP.NET seems to be gets bashed is because it made by Microsoft.

Itâ€™s not about what platform you prefer to use (Iâ€™d rather slit my wrists than use IIS, ASP.NET, or SQL Server, for example), but about your approach to how to sell your product. The majority or websites on the â€˜net today run on Linux boxes, usually running PHP and MySQL (or some other database solution and scripting methodology running on a *nix box of some sort), so to dismiss that vast amount of installed user bases and developers so simply and simply to state that one solution is better than another is to miss the whole point entirely.

Otto needs a reality check

Its not a religion people its just technologies. Shame on Matt for linking to a complete non-issue. WordPress is good at what it does but it can’t be everthing, there will always be people marketing themselves as better than WordPress.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Wordpress Tags: Open Source, Programming, Web-Development, Wordpress

Blogging Code Of Ethics, Disclaimer, Copyright Notice.

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 18:02:49 +0000

Just a note I have updated my about page. I been meaning to write this for a long time, since I get quite a few emails from people who contact me about products/services/advertisement. This should give them a better idea what to expect from me before they contact me. This is also to reassure my readers about what they can expect from me and this blog. For people who are too lazy to come out of your feed readers and click my about page I have copied and pasted the content below.

Code Of Ethics.

The view presented on my blog are mine alone and do not represent my employers.
There are no hidden agendas in my posting and I don’t make marketing pitches (this includes friends and close contacts i.e. You Scratch My Back, I’ll Scratch Yours).
I do not censor comments unless they are racist, abusive, SEO related, personal attacks on other commentors or off-topic.
My judgements and opinions are not in any way influenced by my advertisers, superior authorities or employers.
I only review products/services which I think are of interest to me and the readers of this blog.
I always make it a point to disclose if there are any conflict of interest.
Advertisements and sponsors are clearly labelled as advertisements and sponsors, I don’t do affiliates if I do the links are clearly marked as affiliate links.
I don’t do paid reviews or any kind of SEO advertisement (sponsored themes, text links, etc).
I don’t accept free products/services, money or anything of great value from companies, public relations or advertising agencies about whom I write. If I do, I do so only to review them and return them. (Though I do accept free T-shirts and products of minor value).

Disclaimer.

If you don’t agree with the disclaimers below please do not read any of the material or use any of the services I provide.

The opinions and views expressed here are my own and do not represent my employers. My views and opinion and are likely to change over time, I like to keep an open mind and thoughts and opinions stated on out-of-date posts may change over a period of time and may not hold true for the present. I do not take responsibility or the accountability for the kind of advertisement show on this site through third-party advertisers. I cannot be held responsible for articles written by guest bloggers this blog. Though I try my best to provide accurate facts and present them fairly, the facts presented here are cannot be assumed to be accurate and fairly presented. Any material downloaded or otherwise obtained through the use of the service is done at your own discretion and risk and that you will be solely responsible for any damage to your computer system or loss of data that results from the download of any such material. No advice or information, whether oral or written, obtained by you or through or from this blog shall create any warranty.

Copyright Notice

All content including pictures, design, code and any other material that is provided or is part of the site are copyrighted, unless stated otherwise. The copyright forbids you to reproduced or distributed any material anywhere on the Internet or offline (magazine articles, CD etc.) without a written permission and consent from me. Though you may link to articles and post with brief excerpts.

WordPress To Launch Theme Marketplace, All Themes To be GPL

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:29:38 +0000

About 4 weeks back I was contacted by Toni Schneider CEO of Automattic. Automattic was thinking of launching a WordPress Theme marketplace for WordPress.com. At that time they wanted to keep to it under wraps. Now Matt himself has confirmed this.

I thought it was an excellent idea especially to give exposure to WordPress theme designers. But there was one confusion i.e. wanted all the themes to be GPL. Below is my response to this. I didn’t get any response to my feedback. Not sure if it has something to with the fact that I objected to a GPL for Premium themes.

We’re thinking of making it a requirement that the themes be original (never published before), GPL licensed (to help other designers and keep the copyright issues simple) and not have any credit links (since they are paid). Any thoughts on that?

How can a theme be premium and GPL at the same time? Once it is GPL everyone has access to it for free. If its free why buy it? I wouldn’t sell a Premium theme with a GPL licence. Also if I am correct you mentioned that the theme is CSS based i.e. using the SANDBOX Theme. Which means It is very easy to grab the CSS source code hence It just doesn’t make sense to GPL the theme.
Credit links need to be shown irrespective of whether the theme is free or premium. Not only is it the right thing to do this is the way most Freelance designers get more clients and spread the word about themselves, it also acts as a copyright.

A comment from malan and a post from Matt blog got me rethinking.

blah! this will KILL any and all free WP themes. great job WordPress.

From Matt’s blog.

Beyond the obvious guidelines of browser compatibility and general not-sucking, weâ€™ll require submissions be original, link-free, not published before, and GPL-licensed. (That also means that all themes in the marketplace will be available FREE to WordPress.org users. That may force some to switch from .com to .org, but thatâ€™s fine.)

I was in the process of releasing my current Theme “Azure Sky” as a free theme. But I had seconds thought of releasing it as a paid theme since I had put so much time and effort into it. I think if I release the theme on WordPress.com it solves both my problems i.e. I get paid for it and it also get to release it for free for WordPress.org i.e. people hosting WordPress themselves.

I am think I am willing to experiment and see how this marketplace works out. As long as the effort that I put into a theme is compensated for.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Design, Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Templates, Web-Design, Web-Development

I Am Back Online, DCAMP, DNS Issues, MediaTemple and BlueHost

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:26:20 +0000

Well its been a really fun and frustrating two weeks for me. Fun because I completely disconnected myself from the computer and Internet. No RSS Feeds, No blog posts, No IM. I went to to Bangalore last weekend with Sagaro and Sid to attend DCamp an UnConference on Design and Usability at Yahoo India, and I had a chance to met a lot of interesting people there like the dezinerfolio brothers Navdeep and Naveen (I told them about the event), PlaneMad (Show him any plane model he will tell you the model number, also most of the maps on Wikipedia for various Indian Metro Cities have been done by him), also thanks to Allagappan (Yahoo Employee) we played foosball at yahoo to kill time before leaving off for the station.

Here are a few pics from PlaneMad’s Flickr account.

Navdeep and Naveen

Sagaro doing his College record work since we reached really early.

Me and Sid laughing at looking at Sagaro above.

Free T-shirts

PlaneMad

Alagappan No he’s not a kid he works at Yahoo.

Its been a frustrating week for my site because my web host BlueHost screwed up my DNS settings. I just realized that no web host is perfect or can guarantee 100% uptime. I think I was a bit too harsh on Media Temple my previous Web Host, even though they did screw things up a bit for me. After my move from MT to BlueHost things were fine until I realized that my site was facing some weird problems.

The first week I had no clue what was happening, my site would return a blank page randomly. I contacted BlueHost and they blamed it on WordPress. A bit later I figured out that it was a DNS issue and BlueHost put the blame on GoDaddy my domain registrar. I contacted GoDaddy and they told me it was BlueHost fault. In the end I ended up sending a mail to Media Temple requesting them to clear their DNS cache. By this time I had researched enough to figure out who was at fault (also thanks to Media Temple who told me what was going wrong, props to them for replying to my mail even though I am no longer their customer). The fault was with BlueHost. This time I explained the problem fully to them and they rectified it within a hour. For some reason my Cpanel account did not update my DNS Zone files properly and it was still pointing to my old Web Host Media Temple. So why didn’t I ditch BlueHost immediately and move to “A Simple Orange” as I was planning to. After being hosted on DreamHost, Media Temple and now BlueHost there were two things about BlueHost that I really liked, and was willing to excuse them for the down time.

Fast 24×7 Live chat support. I hate waiting for replies that take more than an hour.
Great uptime and response time. Comparing all the data collected in the past 3 months and also my pingdom Stats for sites on MT, DH and ASO and BlueHost I found that BlueHost was better.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, General, Technology Tags: Blogging

Moved To BlueHost Media Temple Grid Server Overrated

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 08:00:32 +0000

Its been a bad week for me. I moved to Media Temple hosting 4 days back, yesterday night I moved again to BlueHost. In my hurry I was unable to backup my previous post I apologize to everyone for the lost comments. My Site has been horribly slow and constantly down for 2 full days and the average response time for the site was more than 8 secs (ideally it shouldn’t cross 1sec). While the initial experience with MT was good i.e. buying and setting things up. The support later turned out to be very slow and poor MT doesn’t have a 24X7 support since I am an international customer they took more than 24 hours to reply to any of my questions. BlueHost was a refreshing change I clicked on the Live Chat button on the main page and was immediately connected with a sales person who clarified some of my doubts later I again used Live Chat to get help configuring the MX records since I use Google Apps to maintain my Email. I like to keep track of my site uptime and response time and I use multiple Site monitoring services like Site24X7, mon.itor.us and Pingdom. I highly recommend Pingdom to anyone who is serious about maintaining and monitoring their sites. Pingdom played a huge role in my moving from dreamhost and MT to bluehost. I can already see a huge differences in the response time (its all below 1 sec) and page load and my Pingdom data also confirms this. (Since My DNS is still propagating it still seems a bit slow in Britain and Europe)

Overall MT has been a bad experience for me. For the high cost of hosting it is not worth it. Though they themselves admitted that they were overwhelmed with support questions and hence replies were being delayed. But what I cant understand is why they can’t have a 24X7 support like dreamhost or live chat support like bluehost and the ability to mark support questions as High, Critical, medium etc.The only positive part was they were very professional in handling the issues and immediately refunded my money back.

The most funny or should I say stupid thing that I did was that I had done my research for the past 3 months (using data collected from site24×7 mon.itor.us) and found that bluehost had better uptime and (more important) response time for the sites they hosted over MT. In fact I even commented on this on paul stamatiou’s blog 2 months back and wanted to do a blog post about it but never got down to doing it.

Hey paul I been monitoring your site (MT)and a few others (bluehost, dreamhost etc) using moitor.us and various other tools. I found your response time(MT Grid) a bit slow. I eliminated sites hosted on dedicated accounts. I found that people hosted on bluehost seemed to have much better response time. I will do a write up shortly when I get back home from office. what are your thoughts on this?

So why did I still go for MT ? Well to be frank I am got sucker into the Grid hosting marketing, everyone seemed to be telling how good they were and able to handle the DIGG effect etc. (heck dreamhost handled the DIGG effect for me without a glitch) I now realised that MT grid server is nothing but a marketing bluff.

Security alert: WordPress Competition Winning Plugins Vulnerable

Arpit Jacob — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 07:01:00 +0000

Update: My sincere apologies to all the plugin developers. I usually try to keep track of WordPress security. and buyacrop has been very good at finding exploits and providing patches. In my hurry to warn users I forgot to check if patches were available or if the developers were informed. I think its pretty irresponsible on buyacrop part.

The winners of the WordPress Plugin Competition has been announced. congratulation to all the winners. I am really sorry to spoil the party but I am doing this to inform readers, I would really hate it if someone hacked your site. Unfortunately all the Plugins are vulnerable to security flaws. They are listed here in order of danger.

1. WordPress Automatic Upgrade: It allows any non authenticated user to.
* To generate and to unload the archives of WordPress (including wp-config.php with your data of data base).
* To generate and to unload backups of your data base with which this represents.
* To activate and To deactivate all plugins.
* To update the version of WordPress without your authorization.
2. OneClick: Is vulnerable CSRF (Cross-site request forgery) it allows you to unload plugins – or malicious code – from any URL.
3. Who Sees Ads: Is vulnerable to CSRF and XSS (Cross-site scripting).
4. MyDashboard: Is vulnerable to CSRF and XSS.

Please deactivate these plugins immediately till the authors update the plug-in. A mail has been sent to each of these authors so expect them to patch them quickly.

Thank you carrero for tipping me off.

Original source. buayacorp

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Wordpress Tags: Plugins, Programming, Web-Development