It has been about 7 years I am with internet and 5 years as regular blogger but still remember the day I "saw" the internet for the first time. It was a summer 1999, the word 'internet' was buzzed around but what it was all about, none in my circle could explain. I had completed my final semester exams and in the interim period I visited my sister's summer project at IISC, Bangalore. So it was she who 'introduced' me to internet and the first 'website' I had seen was the Official website of the movie "Taal", because when she asked me to name a site, I had the cassette of 'Taal' in my hand, so I read out that. Needless to say I was quote fascinated and when I joined my Masters, I had a keen intrest on the e-commerce papers. When the Chennai girls of my class were talking about emails and portals, I used to take Philip Kotler to the browsing centers to see the example sites mentioned. In the due process I fell in love with the medium for accomodating anybody who is creative and letting the whole world see your body of work without restrictions or censoring or editing. At the end of the course, I got an urge to develop my own content.
Saravanakumari is my first teacher
Saravanakumari, my sister's friend & my rakhi sister, who joined my college as junior was the first one who taught me the basics creating websites using simple HTML. I kept creating new webpages and linking them but was not satisfied with the 'look' when compared to what I had seen in professional websites. When I digged further I learnt about CSS - stylesheets. Slowly slowly by digging the intresting webpages I stored on my Hard Disk, I started knowing about the existence of javascript and advanced HTML tags.
Take a plunge
My first ever website was the freesite hosted with "Brinkster.com" and then at "web1000.com". When I learnt the concepts of FTP which 'Brinkster's free accounts' didn't support, I moved to "web1000.com". All the initial pages were static pages, so when I wanted to add a guestbook, I learnt that "web1000.com" doesn't allow cgi scripts hosting, I searched and moved to "Netfirms.com". The first site I hosted with Netfirms is available even todayClick Here and taking inspiration from www.qwprince.com, a Hindi/Tamil/Malayalam music juke box run by a BITS Pilani student, Ranjit Chembazhukayil, I even tried my hand at creating a music site of my own called Kollywood Online. Creating these two sites helped me a lot in expanding the horizons to basic knowledge of Photoshop, Flash, Real Media creation, Pop up juke boxes, javascripts and styles. Actually I abondoned those sites and was quite surprised to see them recently online - very much alive still.
Creating own contents
Since I knew only basic HTML I found adding new articles and modifying the menus to accomodate them very tiring. May be because I am a Gemini personality, I had this flair for broadcasting. Whenever I came up with some intresting trivias, (inspired by junk forwards) I used to forward to my friends via email. Not most of the people read it and whomever little read it used to complement me and asked me to put it in a website. My 'email' jollu article on Meera Jasmine received so much of complements from lot of friends that I got inspired to write more junks. So in a way I owe whatever little success and recognition I got from blogging to Meera Jasmine. But I had neither inclination nor technical knowledge to create portal kind of stuffs.
Take a plunge
My first ever website was the freesite hosted with "Brinkster.com" and then at "web1000.com". When I learnt the concepts of FTP which 'Brinkster's free accounts' didn't support, I moved to "web1000.com". All the initial pages were static pages, so when I wanted to add a guestbook, I learnt that "web1000.com" doesn't allow cgi scripts hosting, I searched and moved to "Netfirms.com". The first site I hosted with Netfirms is available even todayClick Here and taking inspiration from www.qwprince.com, a Hindi/Tamil/Malayalam music juke box run by a BITS Pilani student, Ranjit Chembazhukayil, I even tried my hand at creating a music site of my own called Kollywood Online. Creating these two sites helped me a lot in expanding the horizons to basic knowledge of Photoshop, Flash, Real Media creation, Pop up juke boxes, javascripts and styles. Actually I abondoned those sites and was quite surprised to see them recently online - very much alive still. Creating own contents
Since I knew only basic HTML I found adding new articles and modifying the menus to accomodate them very tiring. May be because I am a Gemini personality, I had this flair for broadcasting. Whenever I came up with some intresting trivias, (inspired by junk forwards) I used to forward to my friends via email. Not most of the people read it and whomever little read it used to complement me and asked me to put it in a website. My 'email' jollu article on Meera Jasmine received so much of complements from lot of friends that I got inspired to write more junks. So in a way I owe whatever little success and recognition I got from blogging to Meera Jasmine. But I had neither inclination nor technical knowledge to create portal kind of stuffs.
Getting an own address
Again it was my sister who was in US then, got my first domain name registered for me. For a while I didn't use the name for blogsites because I felt my domain name too personal. So only personal photos and personal details were hosted on that domain name while the blogs were in some other free hosting subdomain.
Choosing the right script:-
Again I stumbled upon the CMS [Content Management System] concept accidentally while looking for a dynamic gallery script. I got to know about two major concepts - PHP and MySQL. Since Netfirms doesn't support PHP or MySQL Databases, I had to look out for some other free webhost with PHP support. My first ever portal was set in late Oct - early Nov '03, a compilation of junk mails I had forwarded over a period of time, with a now defunct script called "Angeline CMS". To cut the story short I moved to PHPX along with my domain name and stayed with PHPX for about 3-4 years. I was very active in their forums and a PHPX guru. When I started getting a sizeable numbers of daily visits, I wanted to expand the functionalities like Downloads, interactive blogging etc, I had no other choice than moving out of PHPX. Believe me, it was a decision not so easy to make because I got emotionally attached with PHPX team that whatever queries/wishes I put forward they got acknowledged with my name (Thanks to Maheshwaran) in the development lists. That is one major reason that my wedding site is hosted with PHPX script.
Till now I was with banner sponsored free webhosting only. Once I started getting decent visitors, my bandwidth started getting exhausted in the mid of the month itself, I had moved to paid hosting by late 2006. By that time I had moved to IT and could afford to pay the hosting charges for my passion - blogging.
Feeling relaxed:-
In the earlier days I was concentrating too much on style and scripts rather than the content. But once I moved to Joomla!, I decided to stop concentrating on the technical nitty gritties and evolve as a good blogger. Blogging is something I recommend for many of my friends who had this capability of seeing things in a different perspective. As far as I am concerned, I owe a lot to this blogging habit that it helped me in venting out my feelings to a large number of people other than my friends, an excellent tool for retrospection in form of documented emotions / incidents and a way of self assurance. In short, my blogs represent me exactly the way I am, becoming an alter ego of mine. With the functionalities of Joomla! I can track the number of reads for each article, so it assures me that there are few takers for me and my scribblings in this cyberworld. Thanks to their feedbacks and some friendships through that, I am blogging without getting bored even after five long years.
Online Friendships:-
Thanks to my blogging I had been able to reconnect with some of the lost friends and get some new ones. Of those friendships some lost touch after sometime, but some people touched me with their prayers when I was in low spirits. After going through my outburst blog against entry barriers for freshers, one guy called Mahadeva from Dubai mailed me with some soothing words. I got in touch with sweet souls like Suresh, who is the protagonist of "Expiry Dated Friendship" blog and Ananya from Abu Dhabi, who is more a sister to me now and I call her as "Akka". On the whole the journey of my blogging till now was fine, intresting and adventurous, becoming a habit of mine to vent out whatever emotions I undergo at any moment via blogs, no matter how much engaged I am.
At this I am just praying that the domain name of mine and blogging should be continued till my last breath. After all it gave me a chance to reinvent myself that sometimes just to write a blog, I saw / read some intresting movies / books. Sometimes friends like Vaithy who read my blogs gave their views / perspective of things that led to some intresting conversations and arguements complementing to my growth as an individual. Above all the blogs gave me a sense of independence that I no more look for somebody just for the sake of sharing my happiness / sad, so I manage to stick around with only people of my tastes and preferences.
Choosing the right script:-
Again I stumbled upon the CMS [Content Management System] concept accidentally while looking for a dynamic gallery script. I got to know about two major concepts - PHP and MySQL. Since Netfirms doesn't support PHP or MySQL Databases, I had to look out for some other free webhost with PHP support. My first ever portal was set in late Oct - early Nov '03, a compilation of junk mails I had forwarded over a period of time, with a now defunct script called "Angeline CMS". To cut the story short I moved to PHPX along with my domain name and stayed with PHPX for about 3-4 years. I was very active in their forums and a PHPX guru. When I started getting a sizeable numbers of daily visits, I wanted to expand the functionalities like Downloads, interactive blogging etc, I had no other choice than moving out of PHPX. Believe me, it was a decision not so easy to make because I got emotionally attached with PHPX team that whatever queries/wishes I put forward they got acknowledged with my name (Thanks to Maheshwaran) in the development lists. That is one major reason that my wedding site is hosted with PHPX script.
Till now I was with banner sponsored free webhosting only. Once I started getting decent visitors, my bandwidth started getting exhausted in the mid of the month itself, I had moved to paid hosting by late 2006. By that time I had moved to IT and could afford to pay the hosting charges for my passion - blogging.
Feeling relaxed:-
In the earlier days I was concentrating too much on style and scripts rather than the content. But once I moved to Joomla!, I decided to stop concentrating on the technical nitty gritties and evolve as a good blogger. Blogging is something I recommend for many of my friends who had this capability of seeing things in a different perspective. As far as I am concerned, I owe a lot to this blogging habit that it helped me in venting out my feelings to a large number of people other than my friends, an excellent tool for retrospection in form of documented emotions / incidents and a way of self assurance. In short, my blogs represent me exactly the way I am, becoming an alter ego of mine. With the functionalities of Joomla! I can track the number of reads for each article, so it assures me that there are few takers for me and my scribblings in this cyberworld. Thanks to their feedbacks and some friendships through that, I am blogging without getting bored even after five long years.Online Friendships:-
Thanks to my blogging I had been able to reconnect with some of the lost friends and get some new ones. Of those friendships some lost touch after sometime, but some people touched me with their prayers when I was in low spirits. After going through my outburst blog against entry barriers for freshers, one guy called Mahadeva from Dubai mailed me with some soothing words. I got in touch with sweet souls like Suresh, who is the protagonist of "Expiry Dated Friendship" blog and Ananya from Abu Dhabi, who is more a sister to me now and I call her as "Akka". On the whole the journey of my blogging till now was fine, intresting and adventurous, becoming a habit of mine to vent out whatever emotions I undergo at any moment via blogs, no matter how much engaged I am.
At this I am just praying that the domain name of mine and blogging should be continued till my last breath. After all it gave me a chance to reinvent myself that sometimes just to write a blog, I saw / read some intresting movies / books. Sometimes friends like Vaithy who read my blogs gave their views / perspective of things that led to some intresting conversations and arguements complementing to my growth as an individual. Above all the blogs gave me a sense of independence that I no more look for somebody just for the sake of sharing my happiness / sad, so I manage to stick around with only people of my tastes and preferences.
