The site uses publically available data from BigFlix and presents it in very interesting manner - check out the video to get a feel of the site's capabilities. 

*Please view in HD and in FullScreen mode* 

I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the following three individuals in making this site a success.

• Ann Catherine Jose


• Manojayan Vembakkam


• Ram Adhikari


• Yours truly :)

Some technical highlights that might interest you:

• We used Microsoft Silverlight Pivot control to visualize the data
• The site is powered by about 2 GB of data. We are using Amazon S3 to store this data
• To enable efficient delivery, we are using Amazon CloudFront for CDN 'edge caching'.

Some server maintenance done by my domain hosting provider had caused my blog engine to crash. The error log clearly stated that DBD::mysql was missing. Though I had raised multiple service requests, the problem remain unresolved. I got frustrated to the point where I was thinking of switching to a new hosting provider.

I kept pushing this because of all the work involved in the migration - lazy me :-). I thought of stretching my luck by reopening the support request for one last time - Fortunately, this time, some one *did* take a look at this and the problem was resolved.

So, here I am - back online.

I have upgraded this site to MovableType 4.
This is the first blog with this new engine, Let's see how things go....

I was extremely happy with MovableType - that is until I decided to upgrade to the latest version 3.33. Though the upgrade process finished without any errors, the system started behaving weirdly - the UI had lots of glitches. That is when I noticed that even after the upgrade the system was still reporting the previous version. I had wrote about it here.

There was no news from SixApart for almost a month! And today I saw a new blog on their site saying that they have (actually) released version 3.33 now. They announced that..

Today we are releasing required updates for both Movable Type and Movable Type Enterprise to fix a number of vulnerabilities affecting all previous versions of the platform. The current status of our security update process:

• This is a mandatory update due to the severity of the combined vulnerabilities.
• These vulnerabilities were discovered by our own team during a routine security evaluation.
• There are currently no known malicious exploits targeting Movable Type for these issues.
• We will be disclosing full details of the vulnerabilities on our Professional Network blog in a couple of days allowing you to update in the meantime without incurring unnecessary risk.

... and ...

If you are running a version of Movable Type older than 3.2, it is especially imperative that you to migrate immediately to version 3.33 due to the importance of fixes for the current issues as well as several significant security enhancements which have been made since your version was released.

Release mishaps do happen and I was only happy to see an 'new' release and eagerly started the upgrade process (again). To my surprise the UI glitches are still not fixed.

If you thought the glitches could be trivial, well I let you to decide for yourself...

The glitch is there in 'create new blog entry ' screen itself - Which should be the most important screen in a blogging tool. The formatting toolbar is at the bottom of the screen as a set of stray text links!
I hope SixApart is listening!!!

Correction:
This is my mistake. I had not uploaded all the new static files (.JS, images and .CSS files) into the right place on my server. My static folder was configured to be outside my MT directory and I totally missed this!

We had been using the service of AccuWebHosting for hosting this site. The contract with them expired last week, so we decided to look for other alternatives. After some search, we settled on AspNix.

This was primarily because:
- They provide Asp.Net 2.0 and SQL server 2005 support on Win2K3
- 1 GB dedicated storage for the database
- 50 GB bandwidth per month.
- And also, they are known to provide good support for CommunityServer

Overall the migration process was flawless. I am currently evaluating the use of CommunityServer in this site. I will publish my finding in another blog.

As you can see, I have incorporated Google Adsense into my site. According to Google..

Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This "heat map" illustrates these ideal placements on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance).

Six Apart announced on their site that they have released Movable Type ver 3.3. I was planning to revamp my blog and thought of using this occasion to upgrade the blog engine to 3.3. I followed the instructions and the upgrade went smoothly - except that now, parts of the system reports that the system is running ver 3.3 and at other parts it still shows ver 3.2.

Also the download always points to 'MT-3.32-en_US.zip'. Strange!!

I should admit that I was not able to spend adequate time on FolkMind. Now that I am back from my vacation, I am committing myself again to this. And this time I am hoping that I can maintain the momentum.

Google started an initiative called 'Google Apps for Domains'. According to Google, this service will..

..offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free*, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization's website, too. It's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

One of the first steps that I did is to migrate the domain folk-mind.org to the above Google service. I should say that my migration experience was quite painless and was able to finish the whole activity in less than 2 hours (including adding the default home page).

My only crib is that, currently there is no option to change the 'A record' in the DNS. We can only modify the CNAME record. This results in folk-mind.org and www.folk-mind.org (this time with the www) returning two different pages. My brother helped me resolve this by using a web forward to folk-mind.org.

According to Google, this is what they do..

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You'll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.

The process of enabling this on my site and blog was quite straight forward. I can start viewing reports after 24 hours...

I have registered the domain folk-mind.org and is in the process of configuring this domain to point to the FolkMind SourceForge home. Though I would have preferred a domain name with out the hyphen in between, all flavors of this (.com, .net and .org) are already taken :-(

I am in the process of choosing a good content management system for the FolkMind SourceForge homepage.
My current choice is to either use drupal.org or MediaWiki.

If you are aware of better choice please share the same with me…

I have finish upgrading to Moveable Type version 3.2.

I reorganized the way I achieves my blogs. Some of my old links may not work!
So the previous permalinks may not work – but I learned my lesson and in future I will avoid any such confusion.

I am about to start the process of upgrading my blog engine. This site may be down for some time....