Now we are two

Happy birthday to me, A Tangle Of Wires is two today.

Along the way I’ve bolstered my Bengali learning and learned a whole lot more about Bollywood, which was pretty much the point of starting the blog.

What I hadn’t planned on were the high Google search rankings for Channel 4′s Bollywood films, which  probably says something about writing on a particular niche.

Here’s to the next two years.

Deutsche Welle awards commend Bengali blogs

German broadcaster Deutsche Welle has unveiled the results of its 2011 Blog Awards – the ‘BOBs’ – and a Bengali blog was among the runners up for the Best Blog prize.

Sabrina Sultana suffers from muscular dystrophy and shares her experiences and campaigns for greater rights for the handicapped in Bangladesh through her blog.

The Chittagong blogger was not the only Bengali writer on Deutsche Welle’s list – it devotes an entire category to the best Bengali blogs, short-listing 11 sites.

Learning Bengali page updated

I’ve been tidying up my blog a little this week. Nothing too strenuous mind, that would require a surfeit of spare time, something I don’t yet have.

Nonetheless I’ve added a little to the About page concerning my aim to blog at least once a week, with posts related to Bengali on Fridays and/or posts on any other subject that appeals to me on Tuesdays.

More importantly though I’ve also cleaned up the Learning Bengali page, adding in information from recent posts about Bengali fonts, Google’s language tools, Bengali grammar, YouTube and the Bengali phrase book you can find on Google Books.

Life, but with fuzzy edges

At break-neck slow-motion speed a week has passed since my new son arrived. This has put all non-essential work to one side as I take charge of cooking, cleaning, childcare and my wife recovers.

In the pipeline is a post on Bengali words around a baby theme; updating the older posts I transfered from Blogger to WordPress; and building up the Learning Bengali pages (any suggestions for what this should include would be gratefully received).

First, perhaps will be the baby words. In fact I persuaded my elder son to make suggestions for this today, so it’s creeping along. I didn’t fancy preparing this in advance, just in case it would tempt any kind of fate, so now it’s somewhere on the to-do list, behind sleep.

Transferring back from Blogger

Move along please. Nothing to see here. Transferring back from Blogger, need to check twitterfeed and Google docs behave themselves.

WordPress no longer ignores me

WordPress is no longer ignoring me – so perhaps I just have the world’s smallest supply of patience. Whatever the reason for last week’s problems, I’ll stick with Blogger for the time being and see how we get on.

Moved to blogger for now

I have no patience and ended up on blogger after I thought WordPress was not going to work for me. Now it does but it’s too late for the time being. So the blog is (for now) here.

Twitter raises the usability bar

I’m new to blogging, but a long time reader of (mainly music) blogs. I recently started out on micro-blogging platform Twitter, you know, the one everybody’s talking about. It took a while to get my head around the idea of making everything public for anyone to see, which I know is hardly a new concept when it comes the Internet but one that took a bit of adjustment for me.

What was particularly impressive about it was how easy it is to use. Signing up, getting started, customising my page – there were no real issues there. The comparison with the headaches I had earlier this week with WordPress could not have been clearer. Those headaches may well have be a combination of Internet service, browser, operating system and of course my own lack of technical skills, but they showed how high Twitter and Google’s various tentacles have raised my expectations.

Now I just expect web applications to work, moreover I expect them to be free too and quickly move on if these criteria are not met. I can see this makes me a picky customer, but I doubt I’m unusual there.

Blog practice

Still testing out blogspot and blogging ideas. Expect I’ll stick with blogspot – or is it blogger? – given the headaches with trying to set up WordPress (.com version).

Also looking forward to writing non-’I'm setting up a blog’ posts on proper subjects. You know, like music, films, books, creative writing, art and learning Bengali.

First post

Insert obligatory test posting. Perhaps a musing on how skull-crushingly annoying WordPress was to try and set up. I started a blog there, posted once (eventually) and have yet to see the damn thing.

Perhaps that should be filed under Mac issues, but I couldn’t view the blog once. Not in Safari or in Firefox and the admin pages – also very very slow – didn’t seem to show the correct graphical interface. Shame, as WP was recommended and seems to offer a good range of features.

Anyway, let’s see if this one appears …