Here are some of the basic reasons for not choosing MT and using WPMU:

• MT is huge. The zip file costs about 5MB and extracting it gets a 21MB monster out. Whereas WPMU is only 1.5MB - 6MB when extracted.
• Ease of use - during installation and for creating post.
• MovableType needs rebuilding so many files for every update to a single post. Missed out a word there, save it and republish the entire blog. This is unacceptable for a blog network which wants even technologically challenged people to blog. Not many would understand the republishing process (unless they are the old blogger type). I agree that plain html files are blazingly faster than executing more than 30 SQL queries for every request, but wp-cache does a great job in caching the rendered HTML pages in wordpress.
• Lot of plugins written in PHP. I can get my hands dirty with the plugins if I want to as I have seen and understood the Wordpress architecture more than MT’s.

Regarding the last point, I would be running a series of posts about the various plugins that we use here are Blogial and the problems and incompatibilities we faced while installing it in WPMU.

If someone comes up and suggests a new idea for a blog - we will be happy to create a blog and make them the owner of it. He should then build the blog and most important of all, build a community around it. Any reader who wishes to contribute to a blog, can register and ask for becoming an author in it. This is all about trying to get more people to post in a single blog and to build the blog more social.

This blog network isn’t about making huge money or to compete with the big players. We are just simple minded people who want to blog about things passionate to us. Of course we would think about monetising and would also love to get donations(paypal:srinivasanr@gmail.com) so that we can sustain running this network.

I have this network running on a Wordpress-mu installation which is very easy to get a blog network up and running in minutes. I have it hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech and tried to bring fslog.com also into that. I know that wpmu supports multiple domain names and I tried using this Multi-Site Manager plugin - but couldn’t get fslog.com work in NFShost. Also for creating a blog in blogial, I should manually create an alias in NFS. This needs to be changed asap and we are looking at moving onto a better host (maybe a VPS). If someone can give us some good offer for a VPS, we are listening to you. Till we can fix this, FSLog is going to be on a seperate Wordpress installation.

I am in the process of setting up the blog, installing plugins and creating blogs. Right now we have 3 blogs under blogial.

• FSLog - This one
• Codelog - about programming owned by Sudarsan (previously ProgrammersLog)
• OZ - about living in Australia owned by Anish

I am open to any other blogs that you may want to be here.

I am also looking at creating some good themes for the blog and also a logo for blogial. If someone can help us in it, we would be very happy.

Since we now have more people to post in this blog, you can be sure to get good, quality content here on the network.

I wanted my Ubuntu back and so searched the web for info regarding this and found one. He has given steps to first install Solaris and then Ubuntu, but this holds true the other way round too.

You would need the desktop live CD of Ubuntu for this, so that you can recover Ubuntu’s grub.

1. After booting to Ubuntu Live system, open up the terminal and type sudo grub.
2. You will get a grub prompt - here type

   find /boot/grub/stage1

3. Use this information to set the root device (this may be different for you)

   root (hd0,0)

4. Then install grub

   setup (hd0)

5. And quit

This would get back the Ubuntu’s old grub, but now you have to make an entry for OpenSolaris.

Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add this new entry at the bottom

title	Open Solaris
root	(hd0,1)
chainloader	+1
makeactive
boot

This would enable you to boot to Open Solaris too now. There were problems with my Atheros drivers as usual and I have to find a way to install the madwifi drivers as I did on my Ubuntu. If anyone got wifi working on Acer Aspire 5050 with OpenSolaris, please do leave a comment here.

So, I had to delete the files and the shared directory was having numerous folders. I then wrote a bash one liner (not exactly 1 line) to delete the files.

First I used find to get the list of all the exe files in all folders and stored it in a file (exe_files).

This was the command I then used to delete all the files.

cat exe_files | while read line;do l=`ls -lh "${line}"`;size=`echo $l| cut -d' ' -f5`;if [ $size = "604K" ]; then rm “`echo $l| cut -c”47-”`” ;fi; done

What it does is reads each line in the file and finds the size of each file and if the size is ‘604K‘  then remove the file.

Deleting based on the filesize was not that good, as we might have lost some original file which was correctly 604K. If you wanted a better solution, you would have to write one more if clause to check if the filename is the same as the folder name - better to create a shell script instead of trying a one liner.

Thanks to linux, we could delete all the ~6000 virus files in a simple command without the fear of infection.

This is very well integrated with Google reader that any feeds you subscribe here automatically is reflected in Google reader. Reading a post here marks the post as read in Google reader.

You can recommend, tweet and annotate articles which enables your friends to know what you are doing with your feeds. One important feature is allowing the user to view the post from the site directly in an IFrame. So, I can comment on a post without leaving my feed reader.

They also have a feedly API which lets website owners to write custom views for their content. They also have a plan to allow the owners to better design ads for displaying in their feedly UI.

Overall this is a nice way to read my feeds and I think I am going to try this one for some days. It is available as a free Firefox extension and you can install it by going to the feedly website.

Update: They even have got it integrated with del.icio.us.

People can suggest new topics which they would like to be covered or they can vote on topics already added by other members in the community. It is non-intrusive and takes just a simple sign-on (they have openid too) and adding a widget to your blog. A very simple idea.

So, if you want me to write about any particular topic, just use the widget in the side bar and suggest new topics.

After you have setup an account with NFS and setup a site, you will be given the site details - like FTP, SSH, etc. I prefer using SSH if available, as it is faster to download and install directly than to get it on my machine and uploading it again.

Just ssh to the site and download the latest wordpress tarball and untar it


$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz

If you want to setup the blog at a subdirectory, just rename the ‘wordpress’ folder to something like ‘blog’. If you want it to be at the root of the site, just move all the contents of the wordpress folder to the parent directory.

Then visit your site http://your-site.nfshost.com or the domain if you have registered one.

It will guide you through the install process which is very easy. You just have to give the MySQL database details. You may need to temporarily give write permissions to the public folder, so that the installer can write a config file.

After this, login to your admin page and remember to change the password from Users menu.

Plugins

After you have your blog setup, its time to get some basic plugins installed. You can get more functionality by installing these plugins.

All you have to do is just download the zip files to the wp-content/plugins/ directory and unzip them. The plugins I have installed are:

WP-SuperCache

This caches your blog’s contents as plain old HTML, so that your server doesn’t have to process and fetch all the data from the database. Previously the install process was a bit difficult, but now it has become very easy. Just unzip and activate.

reCAPTCHA

Prevent comment spam by using CAPTCHA for your comments form, also help in converting books to electronic format.

Wordpress.com Stats

Track your popular posts and other statistics by using the wordpress.com’s stats.

Google Analyticator

Google Analytics is an excellent user metrics analysis tool with bright colorful charts and best of all, it is free. This plugin asks just for your Google Analytics’ UID.

Feedburner Feedsmith

Feedburner is a great service for your RSS feeds and I have been using that for this blog for a long time. This plugin is now the official plugin and it automatically redirectly your feeds to the FeedBurner link.

These are my list of plugins. So, what are the plugins that your have?

1. First get the patched madwifi drivers from the site and extract them to some place (maybe your desktop)
2. You need to compile these drivers, so you must sudo apt-get install build-essential.
3. Then cd into that directory which you extracted recently and do a make, sudo make install
4. Then add the following two lines to this file /etc/modules

   ath_pci
   wlan_scan_sta

5. Then make sure that you disabled Atheros from System > Administration > Hardware Drivers (also called Restricted drivers management). If you don’t disable this, the modules which you added in the previous lines wont be loaded.
6. Then restart your system to find a new device named ath0 (when you ifconfig)

PS: I know it has been almost 5 months since I posted here. I am giving the (s/l)ame reason here that I was busy. I haven’t been giving much attention to this blog. If you can give some ideas or suggestions on better managing my time it would really help.

You just have to install a package called dnsmasq.

First install it by running (you need to enable the Universe repository)

$sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

Then, open this file /etc/dnsmasq.conf and uncomment(remove the #) the line listen-address=127.0.0.1

After that edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and search for a line prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; and uncomment it. What this does is, whenever you get a new dhcp lease, the dhcp3 client tool on your computer gets the new lease and updates the /etc/resolv.conf file with the right values for the DNS server.

Using the prepend option, we make sure that 127.0.0.1 appears before the other DNS servers. So, if the details of a domain are already in the cache, it retrieves it fast - else it looks for the other DNS servers.

Now open /etc/resolv.conf and you can see that it doesn’t have 127.0.0.1 now.

search yourisp.com
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 192.168.1.1

The last line may be different for you. I have a router which is configured to use OpenDNS, so my entry points to it.

To check whether the cache really works, execute the following command.

$dig google.com

You will get something like ;; Query time: 252 msec

Executing the command again will get you ;; Query time: 1 msec.

Congrats, you have saved about 250msec by caching the DNS.

(load-file "/path/to/twit.el")

After doing it and restart your emacs, just press M-x and twit-post and type in whatever you want to and press enter. It will then ask your twitter id and password - which gets saved for the entire emacs session. It is a very basic authentication and is not secure.

By the way, FSLog too has a twitter feed. You can follow this feed to get updates when I post here. Thanks to Srid for this tip.