Still confused between Blogger and Wordpress! :|

I started blogging on blogger back in 2005. Then I saw some blogs on wordpress and simply fell in love with their templates. So, I shifted to wordpress, but was disillusioned in no time. I found posting (especially uploading images in a post) pretty confusing and returned to blogger. Again, after some months, I shifted to wordpress and now, at this moment, I feel like coming back AGAIN to blogger!

The reasons this time are,
1. Archiving
In blogger, archive is shown in a tree format, where you can click on each month and view the posts immediately. In Wordpress, when you click on the month, you are taken to a new page which lists all the corresponding posts. And those are in 'summary' format, you have to click on 'View Full Post' to read complete post. This is too much clicking for a reader. In blogger, it takes much less clicks and you are not navigated to a new page unless you wish to read the post.

2. Blogroll
Blogger's blogroll displays the latest post on that blog while Wordpress has a basic simple blogroll.

3. Commenting on other's blogs
When commenting, it's easier to do it through blogger id, because it's linked to the gmail id and most of the times, I am already logged-on on Google. So, no need to login again. Also, using blogger id gives you an option to receive follow-up comments on your e-mail.

4. Templates
Blogger seems to have added some new templates and I quite like my current one!

The only minus point with blogger is, if you need to import posts from another blog of yours, you need a .xml file while in wordpress, you just need to enter the url and login details, wordpress takes care of the rest.

So, I have decided to maintain both blogs. Every new post will come up on both blogger and wordpress while archives before 2007 are available only on wordpress (www.sanketaradhye.wordpress.com)

Diwali!

This post was originally posted on my wordpress blog on Oct. 17, 2009.

Diwali – one of the biggest festivals in India. Diwali means light, happiness, new clothes, crackers, great food. I am typing this sitting in my hostel in Bangalore, while my family is 800 Kms away. Almost everybody from my mother’s side of family is there, celebrating Diwali together. There is something about festivals, doesn’t matter if you are away from family for rest of the year. Festivals have less to do with God or religion, they are really about whole family meeting at one place and catching up on each other’s lives.

For me, this is not first Diwali away from home. In four years of engineering, Diwali always came in submission days, the busiest days in any engineering student’s schedule. I had my share of fun here in Bangalore. Yesterday, I had gone to my uncle’s place whom I hadn’t seen in last ten years! I couldn’t find the house by myself, so he was coming to pick me up. We didn’t need any help to identify each other. It works like magic, something inside you tells that this person is from your own family. Contrary to what I had feared, there was no awkwardness at all. My uncle’s mother, was as affectionate as I have always remembered her. Ages ago, I had gone to their house in Harihar. I was 10 years old then!

There were two parallel conversations. I was talking to my uncle (my mother’s cousin) in English and to his mother in Marathi. You see, my family is a marriage of Maharashtra and Karnataka. My father is a Maharashtrian while my mother is a Kannadiga, though she was born and brought up in Maharashtra. So, only Marathi was spoken in my home. I used to hear Kannada only when mom’s side of relatives visited. Though I can understand Kannada a bit, I can’t speak it. And my uncle can’t speak Marathi!

That brings me to a promise I have made to myself umpteen number of times but never took enough efforts to fulfill it – to learn Kannada. Literally speaking, it is my mother-tongue. And now when I am in the capital of Karnataka, the centre of Kannada culture, its high time I work towards it.

When coming back to hostel, the atmosphere in the city was beautiful. Lamps in front of each and every house, colourful lighting everywhere, and the smell of crackers..aah! Diwali was finally here. More surprises were waiting for me in the hostel. Some enthusiastic friends of mine had done Lakshmi-Puja. And then, it was time for crackers! What a joy! Diwali just doesn’t feel like Diwali without crackers. Thanks to my dear friends, Jayaram especially for arranging everything.

Not a bad Diwali, right?!