Yogesh Sarkar's Blog

One Life to Ride, second edition

Yogesh Sarkar — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:02:38 +0000

Second edition of One Life to Ride, has come out. For those who do not know about it, One Life to Ride is a book by Mr. Ajit Harisinghani, who paints a vivid picture in it, of his motorcycle trip from Pune to Ladakh in June 2004.

I had reviewed One Life to Ride in December last year and got the opportunity to check out the second edition as well, courtesy of Dr. Harisinghani, who sent me a autographed copy of it.

The second edition of One Life to Ride has slight text change and now also contains photographs from the journey, which add flavor to an already interesting read.

Second edition of One Life to Ride also contains part of my initial review of the book, which I wrote in December and is a great honor bestowed on me by the author.

The second edition of One Life to Ride is priced at Rs. 295 and is printed by Promilla & Co. in association with Bibliophile South Asia, with an ISBN number of, 978-93-80188-01-0. You can also check out the official website of One Life to Ride at www.onelifetoride.com.

Safdarjung’s Tomb and Chandni Chowk

Yogesh Sarkar — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:22:14 +0000

On Sunday we conducted another BCMTouring photography meet and this time we visited Safdarjung’s Tomb and Old Delhi (Chandni Chowk and Red Fort) for some architectural and street photography.

Everybody had such a great time during the meet and we clicked to our heart’s content, as both the locations offer so much to a travel and photography enthusiast.

Here just few of the photographs that I managed to capture during the meet:

Safdarjung’s Tomb

A jharokha at Safdarjung’s Tomb

A cute girl in Chandni Chowk

The Doors

A souvenir shop in Red Fort

These are just the tip of the iceberg, you can view several more photographs of the meet and the beautiful Safdarjung’s Tomb and Chandani Chowk at BCMTouring, click here to view them…

vBulletin 4, experiment gone wrong

Yogesh Sarkar — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:29:55 +0000

After much wait and controversies, vBulletin 4 has finally made a public appearance. Although still in a early beta and not available for public testing, at least thousands of forum admins, who use this famous forum software to run their communities, now know what future looks like.

And boy does it sucks!

Not only is the default theme much worse than the original one (which wasn’t that good to begin with), it also seems like a copy of phpbb 3 theme, which isn’t good either, but is slightly better!

Add to this, it seems that vBulletin 4 is somewhat of an halfhearted attempt by the vBulletin Development Team, to come up with a new version of the software for the sake of changing the software version!

To begin with, the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) features have been implemented in a rather awkward manner. While now one does get inbuilt sitemap for search engines and URL rewrite; URL rewrite options are rather limited and basic (source), especially when one compares them to what is available in vBSEO or for that matter wordpress, which is a free software!

Add to this, now there are three URLs which lead you to the forum home page as opposed to two in earlier version, which was acceptable and understandable.

example.com/forum/

example.com/forum/index.php

and

example.com/forum/forum.php

Having multiple urls/pages for the same content ensures that your link consensuses gets bled away and doesn’t really makes any sense, however way you look at it.

Then there is the video embedding feature (video uploads are still not supported), which has finally been included in vBulletin 4. However unlike plugins like AME, which automatically covert urls from video sharing sites to an embedded video, vBulletin 4’s implementation requires user to click on insert video link and then insert the link to the video.

While for expert users it might not be a big deal, for novice users, it can certainly be a turn off. Not to mention if like me, you too are using AME (highly likely), then you will either have to keep using the plugin or go in and fix each link or worse still, leave those videos to be converted into normal links.

Apart from this the new version of my favorite forum software, is not fully compatible Internet Explorer 6 and has quite a few rough edges and things I do not like.

While I am hopeful that at least some of these issues will get addressed, before the gold release. I seriously hope that vBulletin developers take all the suggestions mentioned here and in other blogs and their support forums, in a good and healthy manner and work to ensure that future releases are more enthusiastically accepted and welcomed by the community and is really a notch above not only the earlier versions of vBulletin, but also other forum software.

Happy Diwali

Yogesh Sarkar — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:57:55 +0000

I would like to wish everyone a very happy and prosperous Diwali.

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Shimla travelogue completed

Yogesh Sarkar — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:18:21 +0000

Finally managed to finish travelogue of my recent trip to Shimla, you can read it over at BCMTouring, Shimla – A Colonial Feast.

While the travelogue contains 51 photographs and 7 videos, they are amongst the best I have yet been able to capture and are one of the main reasons, which have compelled me to go back to Shimla some time in future. Because it might just be a tourist trap and a concrete jungle, but it still has beautiful architecture and the toy train ride is simply marvelous. All this and more, makes one forget the headaches one encounters while traveling in Shimla.

Here are couple of my favorite photographs from my Shimla trip:

Shimla Police Headquarters

Christ Church at ridge

For more, visit Shimla – A Colonial Feast.

Yogesh Sarkar's Blog

One Life to Ride, second edition

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Safdarjung’s Tomb and Chandni Chowk

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vBulletin 4, experiment gone wrong

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Happy Diwali

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