Mandar Marathe

A 3-image HDR taken at sunset in outback Queensland, Australia.

Sunset in Emerald, a town in Central Queensland, Australia. Emerald is a service town for a large number of industries in the area, especially coal mining and cotton growing. The train line that runs through the town is an important asset and vital link.

I took this photo while driving back to Brisbane from Roma.

Longreach, Queensland is an interesting place. It is the town where the airline QANTAS was born. In recognition of this, there is a museum called QANTAS Founders Outback Museum at Longreach Airport. As part of the exhibits, they have QANTAS’ very first Boeing 747 aircraft on permanent display - for AUD$19 you can get a guided tour of the aircraft too.

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The WP-Compress-HTML plugin for Wordpress has been released today.

WP-Compress-HTML reduces HTML file size by removing unnecessary white space from the HTML document created by the WordPress blog.

Visit the main WP-Compress-HTML informatiion and download page for instructions, FAQs and further information.

While searching for ways to optimize my WordPress blogs, I came across a video of a presentation given by John Pozadzides at Dallas WordCamp on 29 March 2008. John has posted the text from his talk on this blog - 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog.

These are the tips I picked up from that 1-hour session. You can also watch the video at Viddler.

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Today marks a new phase in the history of my website.

For the past few days I have been experimenting with WordPress as a blogging tool. Version 2.5.1 was recently released and I thought I’d give it a try.

Having spent some time years ago with much earlier (and more raw) versions of WordPress and other blogging platforms, I was pleasantly impressed with the ease of use, plugin/widget extensibility and most of all, the SEO-savvy features of WordPress 2.5.1.

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