After much thought, I am switching over to TextDrive for my websites. The facilities at TextDrive are simply fabulous – from top-notch hardware to software such as Subversion, Ruby on Rails, and Python CGI; and best of all, an excellent bunch of hard-working guys there along with a vibrant community. Of course all this comes at a cost but it’s worth it.

I also upgraded my blog to WordPress 1.5. It is running on PHP5. Woohoo! The only thing I’m missing is my old theme which didn’t work well when I upgraded to WP1.5, so I had to ditch it. After going through the themes gallery, I picked the award-winning Connections theme and modified it to my liking.

The time gap between my signing up with TextDrive to moving my blog to over there, upgrading to WP1.5, doing customizations and switching DNS addresses to the new location was all done in flat 16 hours!

On a different note, I want to convey my special thanks to Dr Mutha of AIPPG.com who provided my (free) hosting till now If you write good articles and in need of a good host, then take a look at AIPPG’s Free Hosting details and contact Dr Mutha. Please be prudent in your writing ^*.

Also, I’ll be moving byteofpython.info to TextDrive soon but I want to actually use Python for that website. So, I’m starting off by reading PyWebOff, although I have a strong recommendation of Nevow by Sridhar.

I’d be grateful if I can get some pointers to actual websites using any of these plethora of tools.

* I am not affiliated with AIPPG nor with Dr Mutha. I am just a happy user of their services. Please contact them directly for any communication.

In sync with my fave song of late – Pink Floyd’s "Coming back to Life" – this blog is back alive and kicking again

Well, no, I hadn’t gone underground, it’s just that I’ve become too involved in stuff and now I’m slowly getting untangled and back to dabbling in all stuff again….

You’ll also notice that my blog is now shifted to swaroopch.info – thanks to Dr. Mutha from aippg.com for offering me the free domain name and hosting

I’ve also moved my book to byteofpython.info also thanks to Dr. Mutha…

Of course, I don’t want you to do any hard work, so you’ll still be able to get a feed of my blog through the old g2swaroop.net URL as well

Also, I have switched to WordPress and spent all night yesterday customizing it and spent all night today copying all the blog posts from the old blog location to WordPress…. that was quite a bit of work. So, please do comment on the look and feel of my blog – feel free to crib about the fonts, colors, anything at all!

To sum it all up, my web presence is now divided into three websites:

• g2swaroop.net – my ‘main’ website
• swaroopch.info – my blog
• byteofpython.info – my python book

I thought I’d take some time out and read up on Python metaclasses, so I entered "python metaclasses" in the google (yeah, google) search bar in Firefox and pressed go and guess what I was looking at – my own blog post! :-O

So, I finally upload the new version of my website. It has taken a long time and I’ve stopped blogging quite some time ago as well. Now, my website and blog are "coming back to life"!

I had originally planned to use WordPress, I had even hacked it up and got the perfect look for me. But alas, I realised it is very good as a blogging tool but it is not meant to be a CMS. I ended up editing php scripts by hand and making changes to the code which was what I wanted to avoid in the first place. So, I finally got back to my original choice – Drupal – after making many customizations, here it is! It is not perfect and still some changes need to be done, but I didn’t want to delay things further.

Also, the nice pic on the top of the page is a snap taken during the Mullainagiri trek which me and my Pesit gang went to. But that’s another story…

I’ve set up a discussion board on my website to discuss things such as my book ‘A Byte of Python’ as well forums for PESIT students and alumni.

I’d love to hear any suggestions on how these forums can be made popular or even new useful forums such as a Linux Newbie discussion board. Please feel free to add your comments here to discuss this!

There’s another blog with the same name as ‘Dynamically Typed’ This is not fair. I had originally thought of this name. I repeat, I chose this name originally and independently!!

It is supposed to be a pun that it is really dynamically typed and also programmers will understand statically typed vs dynamically typed languages….

Many readers have been askin’ for a PDF version of the book, so here it is!

As always, check python.g2swaroop.net for the latest versions.

Here is the count of unique visitors for my book, categorized by from where they come:

#

Report:  python.g2swaroop.net

Report Name:  Countries

Date Range:  04/22/2004 - 04/28/2004

#

(no entry)  204
net (Network)   140
com (Commercial)    117
edu (Educational)   15
de (Germany)    14
it (Italy)  10
br (Brazil) 9
fr (France) 9
uk (United Kingdom) 9
ca (Canada) 6
in (India)  6
pl (Poland) 5
ru (Russian Federation) 5
jp (Japan)  4
nl (Netherlands)    4
no (Norway) 4
us (United States)  4
cn (China)  3
mil (USA Military)  3
se (Sweden) 2
cz (Czech Republic) 2
sg (Singapore)  2
au (Australia)  2
nz (New Zealand)    2
at (Austria)    2
ch (Switzerland)    2
hr (Croatia)    2
ar (Argentina)  2
ae (United Arab Emirates)   2
tw (Taiwan) 2
dk (Denmark)    1
fi (Finland)    1
org (Non-Profit Organizations)  1
tt (Trinidad and Tobago)    1
is (Iceland)    1
kr (South Korea)    1
ph (Philippines)    1
hu (Hungary)    1
lt (Lithuania)  1
huascaran   1

My book has been receiving tremendous response. It’s amazing! I have been getting "well done" messages combined with suggestions and corrections from so many people. These helpful readers are from UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, ….! It’s a truly global village out there.

The downside was that my website was down yesterday, but my website did get more than 751 visitors! There has been 645 downloads of my book in the last 4 days alone!

More than 320 visitors have visited my website in the last 2 days alone ! Also, there have been more than 225 downloads of my Python book as well !