Wordpress – Adnan's Den

Upgraded to a new theme – Twenty Fifteen

It’s been a long while since I changed/upgraded the theme of this site. It’s been almost four years that I was using the Twenty Eleven theme for my blog. I modified the theme a bit. I was quite happy with that theme. That theme was full of widgets! Yes… there was a time when I loved to display lots of widgets in my sidebars and footers. But the taste began to change (may be I am growing old). The minimal and clean designs started to appeal to me. I was looking for a new theme for the last couple of months. No doubt to say that, WordPress has some real great themes in their repository, but somehow they failed to attract me. And then came the Twenty Fifteen with the upgrade of WordPress 4.1.

“This is exactly what I want” – came to my mind when I first look at Twenty Fifteen. It is a theme that shows my content clean and clear, without any distractions with different colors. The more important thing is, it works across different devices. The three things I loved about this theme are its’ responsive layout, separate social links and beautiful menu description. Its’ simple, straightforward typography is readable on a wide variety of screen sizes, and suitable for multiple languages.

But I faced a minor problem after installing it. As you can see, I am using Disqus for the commenting system. Twenty Fifteen got a hiccup with Disqus, though it can easily be resolved. Apart from that, I am enjoying a smooth sailing with the new theme. Everything of this theme is so perfect for me, that I didn’t bother to modify the theme.

Are you an open source user? Then you are a pirate!

I’ve just read an interesting article in the Guardian, which states that a US lobby group is trying to get the US government to consider open source as the equivalent to piracy. That means, to that well suited “moron” group, the open source free community is actually a large group of pirates!

Countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India is asked to be considered for the “Special 301 watchlist” by International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), because they use open source software. So what on earth is “Special 301“? According to Guardian’s Bobbie Johnson it is:

a report that examines the ‘adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights’ around the planet – effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure – often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods – to try and force governments to change their behaviours.

Continue reading Are you an open source user? Then you are a pirate!

Prothom Alo Blog: Another New Bangla Blogging Platform

Well… another Bangla blogging platform has appeared in Bangla Blogosphere. The name of the newborn is ProthomAlo Blog, a sister concern of renowned Bangladeshi daily newspaper Prothom Alo. This blog is developed by Hasin, Mahbub Morshed, Emran Hasan and Omi Azad; there may be others but I am aware of only these four guys. Congrats to them for making this blogging platform.

When I got the news that Prothom Alo has published a blog, I then and then hit the address. But when I went to register myself as a blogger there I got the first shock. I’ve to need an invitation code to join there! And they do not mention how to manage one! I don’t have any friends or family working in Prothom Alo, so I really don’t know how to manage the invitation code. Another thing that confuses me is their TOS. There are too many rules and regulations! Those rules are obviously good and reasonable but their quantity is huge. It would be better if two or more rules can be marched together. This would keep the compact summary of the rules same as the previous but in a less space. By the way, I have send them an email requesting for an invitation code, but didnot get any answers from them till now! Well… if anyone knows how to register in this blog please let me know.

This is the first time in Bangladesh that any newspaper starts its own Blogging platform. Obviously this is a new milestone in both Bangla Blogosphere and history of Bangla newspapers. We can hope that from now general readers can express their statements on any issue from different perspective angles. This will really enhance the information field of Bangladesh vigorously, if the blog admins are remain unbiased. And we hope that they will be unbiased till the end. Otherwise this whole thing will be messed up. Another fact is that, we can now expect that other newspapers will also publish their own blog for interacting with the readers.

It seems that Bangla Blogosphere is enriching day by day. Now a days Bangla Blogosphere has reached in a standard through Somewhere in blog and Sachalayatan. And there are other Bangla blogging platform also. And if the personal/individual Bangla blogs of WordPress and Blogspot is considered then one have to admit that Bangla Blogosphere is really big. With numerous blogs of an ever increasing rate Bangla Blogosphere is expanding day by day. We hope that Prothom Alo Blog will take this Blogosphere to a higher level.

See the list of Bangladeshi blogs in Blogosphere HERE.
Visit the Prothom Alo Blog HERE.

UPDATE: To get the invitation code registration in Prothom-Alo Blog group in Facebook is necessary. I got mine in this way. If you have any problem then it is better to email Mr. Mahbub Morshed (as only his email is shown in that group).

Welcome to AUSTronics

I’ve been thinking for developing such a online platform where all the AUST students as well as teachers can share their technical thoughts and knowledge with the rest of the technical world. To give this idea a sense, some of my students came forward. It was really a boiling job. To make the site more lucrative and significant, we’ve decided to collect teachers articles first. By this time we make the decision where to open the site. As we need free hosting without any advertisements, we choose WORDPRESS and BLOGSPOT. WordPress does not give privilege to edit any java scripts or DHTML, which made us to confine our idea within Blogspot.

We’ve made it at last! The AUSTronics is open for all now. Surely the credits goes to my students Arif, Kanto, Razie, Shorif, Tahseen and Asif. Asif develop the site almost alone. He added a nice menu bar at the top just below the title banner. Title banner was designed by Shorif. Today when I was leaving AUST, I found Tahseen circulating the lunching news of AUSTronics by placing flyers in the notice boards.

Dear readers, who’re reading this article, please visit the site of AUSTronics. We don’t expect you to be a technical expertise but we can expect at least you can inform others about the site. By the way to participate in the AUSTronics, you don’t need to be a technical person. Your article is techno-oriented — that’s enough for us!