OK! Finally, I am done switching to the new blog software. The technical issues with it has been solved for the most part. All of the content has been moved. All systems go for more blog posts and articles.

I took time last night to tinker with the blog theme templates to finally settle in on this current design. It is a customised/modified version of the Kubrick theme that is distributed with Serendipity. I am pretty satisfied with the look now - quite readable, clean and sufficiently lively. Drop a comment and let me know what you think.

I had minor problems moving the content from Blogger to here. Being the lazy bastard I am, I didn't want to copy-paste all of the content from Blogger to Serendipity. I had a quick look on the Serendipity forums and did a Google search for a solution that automates this process but ended up dry. I ended up taking out a few minutes to write some code which transferred all data smoothly into the new system. An hour or so later, I had everything running in tip top condition.

I hope to update the blog regularly from now on. So hit back here often and comment often!

I just spent about two hours moving my blog to this new system (hence the new look and the horrible design!).

My blog messed up two days back when Blogger, whose service I had been using, refused to update my blog properly. I had been using the FTP publishing option at Blogger to publish the blog onto this web server. In an attempt to diagnose the problem I tested out Blogger with various options on/off and probed the server I was publishing to as well. The web server was working fine, the upload/download speeds were lightning and FTP server was working normal too. In despair, I even went as far as restarting the server but to no avail.

I ended up rummaging through the various blog scripts and systems on the net to finally settle on the neat open source blog system called Serendipity. It is quite a famous script and used relatively heavily (around 240,000 according to Google). The installation went without a hitch, though I had to modify a few files to get the neat URLs option to work without changing the web server configuration or htaccess files. (If anyone's looking for the same sort of solution, have a look at the GentleSource Weblog)

I shall be fixing up and tuning this new system to get it working as I like; the first priority being getting rid of this horrendous design which happened to ship with the blog system.