Niraj Bhatt’s Personal Blog

After a long day struggling to deploy my web site I have something up and running at http://www/bhatt.co.uk it took me whole day to set it up and still not completely satisfied with it but something is better than nothing. Well whole day does include throwing football (Yes the American one where you don’t use the foot) at my kids in our living room and occasionally playing with them but it was more of a pain then I had expected. In fact it was more pain then setting up my blog with fairly unknown software (PHP & mySQL).

Believe it or not I installed the MS SQL 2005 express edition 6 times to get it working correctly. It worked just fine on my development machine but as classical as it may sound, it refused to work on the deployment server. I faced every single problem that might be out there during the setup but atleast I have faced all the demons.

The only thing I am not satisfied about is that I have to compromise and set the "User Instance=false" in my connection string. This was due to the refusal of SQL express to create the instance for my web application even though I was able to attach and load it in my studio manager. But I will deal with it again in few days as soon as I get some time.

The web site is far far away from being complete. There is just the front page and the only link that is working is to my blog. But at least the registration and login part is working and also the form to send me the message is working.

Next thing to do is to get some aesthetics right and put up my CV in different format to download and forward it to someone. I might also include something to do with vCard. Also make the site more robot friendly and have a basic gallery working.

The next big thing I want to do is setup my own "Open ID" provider on my server. Let’s see how that goes as I still have to do some research on that.

I am so excited about this. Now that my blog setup is up and running and I am ready to write about all the exciting stuff which I cannot think of any thing right now.

Now that you must be wondering about the title of this post which says “Blogs are” which means I have more than one blog that I might be writing to. So let me clear that out. I have problems writing even one blog as you can see, but what I have done is set up an account at live space, blogspot, wordpress and on my own website and I will be posting the same content to all this sites.

Now you must be thinking why would I need to do that and the simple answer to this is because I can. I have got the power of Windows Live Writer in my hand and there is nothing stopping me. Plus I am new to this blogging world and I need to know where and how the strangers are stumbling onto my blogs, what things are working and what is not and I can see the blog in different light at different place.

My favorite one will be my own one which is at http://blog.bhatt.co.uk which I am so much proud about because I have gone through the pain of setting it up in few hours. Few hours because I would just refuse to read the manuals and nothing involves any .Net but thanks to http://www.iisadmin.co.uk/?p=6 I was eventually able to successfully install and configure PHP, MySQL and WordPress on Windows 2003 with IIS. Anyone thinking about having the same setup should read the instructions at http://www.iisadmin.co.uk/?p=6 and follow them carefully they work.

My next step would be to do my website and create a matching template for my blog at http://blog.bhatt.co.uk which is going to be exciting as I will have to learn PHP and some MySQL.

Also I have started learning WPF (I know I am late but have been real busy) so will be blogging about it as well.

Do comeback if you are reading this as you might find some interesting things here.