I finally moved to a website of my own from the previous avatar here. I say finally, because the creation of one’s own personal website, as exciting as it sounds is not so easy – especially for a person like me who doesn’t know a language beyond the archaic ‘C’ (yes, without the data structures part).

The creation of the website took many different twists and turns, like the Hindi movie ‘Race’. The idea of a personal website took birth quite long ago. In fact, it was probably during my first stint at this site - but hardly anyone knew about it. The idea did remain dormant, although along the way, I did get inspired by a lot of top notch bloggers and friends who had their own website. 2009 happened – and I somehow knew this was the right time. A long weekend (courtesy, Martin Luther King Jr.) came by and the website took birth. An idea finally flourished.

It would not be fair not to credit the people and services who have helped me along the way -

1) Bluehost.com – Their technical service is excellent. Priced at a reasonable $4.95 per month (package of 2 yrs and a promotional code for which I had to vigorously search over the net) and awesome installation features, this was a breeze.

2) ElegantBlue theme by Nathan Rice – You have no idea as to how many themes I looked at before I chose this one. In fact, I lost count. I was looking for something elegant, not too wordy, not too jazzy, not too gaudy, not too dark…you know, the utopian kind. This just fit the bill. Although I had to customize it a lot (yes, I learnt a bit of PHP and HTML along the way), the initial theme was plain awesome.

3) Lekhni - I do not know her real name, but this is her blogging name. I had bookmarked one of her posts long back when she created a website of her own, and it was immensely helpful.

4) WordPress forums – Immensely helpful. I understood the difference between Post and a Page, Tag and a Category and how to use these effectively. And that was just the start.

5) Harish Jayagopal – A colleague of mine and a very good friend. As of today morning EST, my website was looking just perfect in Mozilla Firefox but was looking awful in IE. Plain horrible – with alignment drastically screwed up, widgets all over the place etc. Harish Jayagopal to the rescue. I mentioned this to Harish just in passing in the morning. By afternoon, he had figured out where the problem was and how to fix it. And this was just the start. I would call him a techno-solver-psycho.

6) Pavani – A very good friend of mine, although I have never met her (yes, indeed strange). Her constant encouragement and reviews of my different themes and templates was wonderful. Sanity check – very important.

7) Chandu – Her one line criticisms/encouragement as always.

Now, onto the website – I have multiple plans that I want to implement through my website. My business writings will also appear with regularity unlike the earlier avatar. Which means, that there would be more updates per week than just one. I would strongly encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed/via Email (options on the Sidebar).

I also plan to invite multiple authors to put in their articles very soon. I still have to figure out the technical details of giving permissions to my website though . Will send out mails once this detail is figured out.

Last but not the least, I would love any feedback with respect to the website. I think I have tested it thoroughly, but do let me know immediately if you encounter any problem/have a suggestion (My contact information right below my picture).