Site re-design – January 2012

Posted on Thursday 19 January 2012 by Mandar

I consider myself an "old veteran" of the Internet. I have been using the Internet on a daily basis since October 1993. Of course, in those days it was mainly just emails through my university account. The Netscape browser had not even been invented, let alone Google, Hotmail or Facebook.

I have maintained a web presence through a website, in one guise or another, since 1995. The oldest domain name I presently own was bought in November 2000. This domain (mandar-marathe.com) was registered in 2006.

That was a time when I was the only "Mandar Marathe" on the web, and things were relatively simple. A Google search for "Mandar Marathe" resulted in my name at the top of the results page; the first 2-3 pages of search results were dominated by my various sites and pages.
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Free wi-fi on National Express trains

Posted on Tuesday 21 October 2008 by Mandar

I am writing and uploading this post while sitting on a National Express train going from Doncaster to London.

I found out a while ago that National Express’ East Coast Mainline trains are equipped with free wifi for all passengers. Today is the first time I’m trying this out.

It’s really quite impressive!

I plugged my laptop into an electricity power point and logged into an unsecured wireless network called “nxecwifi”. It’s as simple as that.

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The WWW: Our Modern-Day Oracle

Posted on Friday 18 July 2008 by Mandar

The “internet” is the system of data connections between different networks of computers; it can support a variety of protocols for sharing data between computers, allowing activities such as email and FTP. The “world wide web” is a system of linked documents (“web pages”) accessed via the internet with a web browser.

I started using the internet on a regular basis in 1994 while at university. We had workstations that used an early web browser called NCSA Mosaic. The number of web pages in existence at that time could be counted in the thousands. I setup my own website on the university’s servers in 1995.

The utility of the world wide web has been growing exponentially over the past 10 years to the point where many people like me can now think of it as a modern-day oracle.

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WP-Compress-HTML released

Posted on Monday 12 May 2008 by Mandar

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.

John Pozadzides gives us “45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog”

Posted on Sunday 11 May 2008 by Mandar

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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Well done, Team WordPress!

Posted on Saturday 10 May 2008 by Mandar

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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