Revival

I have three main interests and from that three sister blogs had spawned over the years. The first of the three was photography, and I had always wanted to aggregate all my photos into one site. Not for hosting - I have SmugMug for that, plus Flickr for the social side - but as a gallery.

As I was a beta tester for Squarespace, I was given a good offer to use their services. I used that opportunity to create photobyharis.com. It has a fantastic interface, but unfortunately, I never had the chance to really tweak around with it. Since I had some time off, I finally had the chance to look things through.

First out was the planning of the site, plus uploading the material. And they were tons of them. Fortunately, with the bandwidth I had at the apartment, that part was easily taken care of.

Next came the finishing touches. And this would be the one which I would struggle with. But hopefully, the site would be ready by the end of the weekend ........

As for my other two interests - tech and Haematology news - that would have to wait. A lot of work ahead then.

Four Years and Counting

It had been 4 years since I uploaded my first entry into this blog. The first real upload happened while I was contemplating the projects to do during my sabbatical, which hopefully would lead up into a PhD plan. It was way past midnight, in the bedroom in front of the laptop when everybody else had been fast asleep.

I decided, why not structure a blog. I had been hearing about SquareSpace, and decided to give that a go. The platform let me blog from anywhere, and I just caught the big from then on. And this would be my 1666th entry, just on this journal alone. Not exactly prolific but often work got in the way.

It was always great to be able to post up my own photos, document my travel, and after a few years look back at what was penned down. Certainly brought back great memories, and a few no too great ones. I had certainly aged a lot since then. I left the University, got my own practice, my boys all grown up. It formed my personal diary, and I felt I got a lot from the writing.

I hoped to be doing more traveling in the future, and enrich the blog with more tales. I wish that I could have more free time to do just that, but hopefully when we move into our new apartment, I would be able to cut down on the traveling time - for me time wasted on the road - and consolidate my other blogs, which I have a problem updating.

Here's to four more years. Cheers!

Foto by Haris

Since beginning of the year, I had been doing beta testing for my blog engine, SquareSpace. It was mainly for the need iteration, SquareSpace version 6. Certainly it was a departure from the software behind harisrahman.com, which ran on version 5. I was offered to upgrade but decided otherwise. The current blog was already week customised, I couldn't be asked to spend the extra time doing the updating. The current routine works OK as far as I was concerned.

As a reward, I was given a free account. One of the thing I noticed about the new version was, it was platform agnostic. The website more or less looked the same no matter what device you use. It looked the same on the laptop, the iPad and even the iPhone. It also optimises itself for viewing on the Nexus 7. A sister website, fotobyharis.com was born.

The new version also has an excellent gallery feature for photographs. So, I decided to use that for a new gallery. I used to use another account for this but I found it to be rather cumbersome. With the new engine, I just upload it straight up and the website optimised itself. Less headache. I still use SmugMug for my repositories, and that would remain so for some time.

I actually starting to like the new version. It still took a bit of time to get used to things. Updating on the fly was still not possible as I used to do it. But the site definitely has potential .......

Site Was Down?

I woke up this morning to an email from my blog server, SquareSpace. Their server in the middle of Manhattan was flooded overnight, due to Sandy. Ne'er thought that thousands of miles away, I was feeling the brunt of it.

The power to the server were patchy and as a precaution, the node was powered down. The site was expected to be down for a few hours until the issue with backup power were sorted out. From what I gathered, it didn't take them too long to get that organised.

When I checked the traffic details, it was clear that the numbers were down. It didn't matter however, as the status of my blog was not at the top of my priorities looking at the devastation in New York. By the afternoon, service was resumed and the blog was back up, running as usual ....

More on the Squarespace Note

So, I had a couple of goes with the Squarespace Note app. Hmm! It uploaded up alright, but unfortunately, it did not reformat the text. As a result, the upload needed plenty of reformatting on the website, which I did not have to do if I were to cut and paste onto the main Squarespace app.

The actually drafting however was such a breeze as the interface was uncluttered. And me being a simple person really love the screen when I type. Only the keyboard and the text appeared on the screen and I could just concentrate on composing.

There was still no iPad equivalent of the app - Day One had one. And the lack of sync between devices and desktop was still a main drawback. For the time ring, I would draft my entry on the app - I was doing it right now - and then paste them over to Day One, and again onto the main app.

It was still only a 1.0 version and I was sure that over time, improvements would appear. Then, things may pick up. I would keep my eyes peeled ....