Dear Readers,

It has been a long time that I’ve spoken to you. How have you been all this while?

Me? I’ve been great managing all the daily hectic tasks that I do.

Changes to the site

As you may have noticed (You! Yeah, you, reading in your RSS Feed Reader. Head over to http://preshit.net right away, because), the theme has undergone a major makeover by me. I’ve implemented a completely new color scheme and the blocks have been moved around a bit. The biggest change comes in the form of Asides. Most of you might be aware that I used to maintain a tumblelog at http://presh.it . However, now I’ve integrated both my Tumblelog and my blog into one. All the linked posts, photos, tid-bits will now be posted as Asides into this blog. I spent a few hours hacking the CSS to change the look of Asides, so they show up differently on the homepage and are easy to make out. I also cleaned up the Sidebar by removing the Skribit widget and moving my Flickr Photostream down to the Footer.

On the other hand, http://presh.it, which previously housed the tumblelog has now been converted into a static, imageless site powered completely by CSS. The site showcases some of my online activities.

Changes to the Backend

Thanks to all the traffic, the site is now powered by a (dv) from Media Temple. I’ve been planning to move my sites onto their (gs) for quite a while now, but I was able to manage to pay a few extra dollars and got the (dv) at a nice discount. It will be a great learning exercise for me, managing my own server and at the same time, will be a relied to the site. I didn’t want to put extra load on ExperTrio‘s Servers, considering the fact that I don’t pay a penny to host there.

Also, I’d become a terrific fan of Shaun Inman‘s Mint Stats, so much so, that the analytics of my sites are now Minted. Sure, Google Analytics may be free (maybe even better), but ever since my move to Apple products, I’ve realized the importance of three things.

• Design
• Ease of Use
• Elegance

And mint satisfies all of the above with a high margin.

Changes to the RSS feeds

With all these changes, I’ve made a few changes to my RSS feeds too. Kindly make note of the changes as follows.

• Blog’s Main RSS feed is now: http://feeds.preshit.net/preshit/blog
• Blog’s Comments feed is now: http://feeds.preshit.net/preshit/blog/comments
• My Flickr Photostream has a feed now: http://feeds.preshit.net/preshit/flickr
• My Twitter updates have a feed now: http://feeds.preshit.net/preshit/twitter

I am aware that I may have lost a bunch of subscribers here, but I believe I can build up more along the way.

Smoking Apples

I’ve been having a great time working on/with Smoking Apples. Having launched on August 15th, 2008, the site has evolved into a popular Apple blog and “the” source of information for quite a few. Here’s some info from out ‘About‘ page.

Smoking Apples is a website and blog dedicated to all things Apple and with a special something for our Indian readers. From Macs and iPods to the iPhone and Apple TV, we strive to be your one-stop solution for any and everything related to Apple Inc. and its products. Throw in a podcast, few great authors, regular blog posts and reviews, some screencasts, and various other extra-curricular activities and you’ve got yourself a full fledged website. Yeah, even we were surprised. 

Check out who’s behind the site here.

In these three moths, we’ve managed to pull a daily average of over 10,000 pageviews and counting. Everyone on the team has now taken on a dedicated role and yours truly is officially the ‘Advertising and PR Manager‘ of the site. Of course, writing still remains the core duty.

We launched a monthly magazine a few days back, the response for which has been terrific. It managed to gather over 2400 downloads and many of the readers appreciated the design and content. I’d like to specially mention the efforts of dear friend Milind here. Splendid job, my friend.

The blog now has two new authors and we’re even more psyched. We’ll be reviewing some Apple products and some exclusive accessories in the coming days. You can subscribe to the blog or follow us on twitter.

Miscellaneous

There’s a ton of work left EWS and with just one more paper left, I’m confident I’ll take care of that in a week’s time. I need to announce the winners of the Hosting Account Giveaway, which I’ll be announcing on the 21st of November, just three days away.

Thank You

Regards,
Preshit

Tagged as: change, feeds, rss, site, smokingapples, The Blog