Dear Readers,

I have decided to remove the guestbook feature from the site because I was getting spammed from all corners and had to spend around an hour every day cleaning all the junk postings. Unlike the Wordpress, this system had no good mechanism to filter out the spam.

If you want to get in touch, you know the email address - vedic dot astrology [at] gmail dot com.

Abhilasha, who keeps looking out for various ways to improve this site, pointed me to this site that provides a way for bloggers to send out periodic emails about their blog to subscribers. I have integrated it with the rss feed of this website.

Please use the small form on the right sidebar to subscribe. For those who are afraid of spam hitting them, please be assured that I have no intention of using these email addresses to send unsolicited emails and I am assured that neither will this site Zookoda do anything like this.

On 15th of every month, if there are any new posts, an email will get sent to all subscribers from newsletter [at] planetarypositions dot com. There would be an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email, which will provide a mechanism to opt out. If you do not want to wait for the next newsletter, just drop me a line or use the comment field on any of the posts.

Hello Readers,

Its once again my turn to ask for help. This time, it is regarding the Wordpress installation and problems that I have been facing with permanent links (permalinks in Wordpress parlance), since I have not been able to customize it to my liking. I have version 2.0.4 of Wordpress installed on Godaddy’s linux hosting package. I have edited and completely changed the “default” template for Wordpress to make the look and feen consistent with the rest of my website.

As you can see, I have a lot of posts and under a few categories. When it comes to category links, a trailing slash at the end of the URL is making a lot of difference. i.e. for the category link:

http://www.planetarypositions.com/notes/category/astronomy/

if I remove the last slash and then refer to the URL as follows:

http://www.planetarypositions.com/notes/category/astronomy

Then Apache returns an error of 404 and the page does not appear at all. I suspect it is a problem/bug in the Godaddy’s wordpress installation. I searched on the net and found out the following thread on the wordpress support site:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/81515?replies=6

I have also been playing around with the .htaccess file under the notes folder, but not been able to find out the exact combination that would work. Any ideas on how to fix this problem?

Tags: Wordpress, Permalinks

I have been having a blast with my new ISP since I moved here a month back. I have finally managed to move everything to one place. Images, applet code, servlet code all is in one location and I am sure regular visitors to this site are not complaining as well. Moving the blog completely to this site is just another step in this consolidation. My new tools of writing an article are:

• Wordpress, which is installed on the ISP and
• Microsoft Writer that I have recently downloaded to try out.

Leave Astrology aside for a moment… I would love to know about your views about the two tools mentioned above, or if you have another great idea for me to try out. Why or why not Writer is not that good a tool - is there anything else that I should try… let me know.