Meeting Anishas Aunty and Uncle

Today I met Anishas Uncle (Waka) and Aunty (Sumiti). We met for lunch in Mission Bay at the MECCA (85 Tamaki Drive, Mission Bay). Waka works for EDS, with his current project working with Telecom on their project to move from CDMA to GSM Technologies.

Sumiti works for the Todd Family.

On the website front, I had organised with my web host to have my sub domain of blog.nztechie.com to point to Googles ghs.google.com and activate the custom domain service that Google offered. This appeared to work, but it now appears to not be functioning. I have lodged a ticket with my host to have it fixed.

I understand that it could be a propagation issue, but I am quite confused as to how it immediately did work when set up. At this stage I have left the configuration in place on Blogger, which will make this Blog inaccessible until the problem is sorted. If you can read this, then the problem has been sorted! [Update: Shortly after writing this blog, I re-enabled the original website address of pickledhamster.blogspot.com]

Anisha went to the Ellerslie International Flower Show in Manurewa yesterday.

Useless Information: Colonel Sanders original white suit was auctioned off for $80,000 in February 2002.

Some minimal changes to my online presence

I dropped Anisha off to her aunties house after work tonight. She is going to the flower show on Friday. She has organised to get the day off work to attend.

This evening I made a few changes to nztechie.com and my blog. Firstly, I'm planning to re brand my blog so that it effectively fits under the nztechie.com brand. This will be achieved by two methods. Firstly, I have requested my hosting company to create a CNAME record to point to Googles DNS server so that a new sub domain of blog.nztechie.com will be redirected to Googles servers.

There is always the opportunity to host on my own server if I ever wished to. With 300 gigabytes of storage on my host, I'm not going to run out of space very quickly. In fact, the indicator on my websites configuration has been steady at 1% of storage usage for the last three years!

Secondly, I have rebranded the blog so it displays an image for the title, displaying NZTECHIE.COM - BLOG. This looks a bit cleaner, but there is a little concern that I might be penalised in googles search results for removing some of the title text.

Thirdly, I added the capability to subscribe to my blogs RSS feed to my main website. After a little bit of work, and one line of easy text, visitors can now subscribe to the blogs RSS feed in one click. RSS length has also been changed from full to short in my Blogger preferences. I also helped Nanar Tan set up a blog for herself on Blogger.

Useless Information: Chlorophyll makes plants green.

The Paradigm shift of Focus

With all the excitement and involvement with building my blog, I have tended to neglect my homepage at http://www.nztechie.com

Tonight I did a tiny bit of work to enhance access to my photo blog. It's actually a workaround to a problem that has existed since I required directory level authentication to access my photo gallery. Now when people open my photo gallery, they will be required to authenticate themselves only once, not twice as they have been forced to up until now.

Useless Information: In 1972, a gorilla by the name of Koko, was taught ASL (American Sign Language) for the deaf. By the year 2,000 the gorilla could understand approximately 2,000 English words.