One year of indianraga

This week this blog completes it's one year. In fact, my other blogs on wordpress.com, myspace.com and multiply.com too completed one year of existence. When I started off, I was a novice both in my knowledge of hindustani classical music and blogging methods. I was so unsure of myself that I decided to write 4 blogs at once, believing that I could decide which ones to keep and which ones to abandon at a later stage, depending upon their popularity.

To start with I began to search for a host site that offered a good amount of space for my music files. After much thought I decided upon eSnips.com which offered 5 GB of server space and most importantly, it was totally free. It's community flavour and interactive concept also helped me in deciding for it. At about the same time I started learning a bit of HTML and Javascript which I came to know will be essential to write my posts. On 25th of August 2007 I uploaded my first music file on eSnips and continued to do so for the next couple of months - about 3-4 files per day on an average.

It was a pleasant surprise to get an overwhelming response from other users on eSnips. In the beginning I made sure I uploaded only those songs which I liked personally. But writing on my blogs was a different deal altogether. I had to be careful not to prove a fool of myself in the age when 10 year old bloggers are common place. But after some time I discovered that it was not such a big deal after all. I started off with Blogger and soon came to know that it was easy to import blogspot blogs into wordpress.com and multiply.com (but not vice versa) and I really did not struggle too much in doing that.

One mistake I did and which was a bit jarring to most of my visitors was that I chose the mask of King Tutankhamen (Pharaoh of Egypt) as my logo. Now, Tutankhamen has nothing to do with hindustani classical music even with your furthest stretch of imagination. I soon corrected my mistake by changing my logo to that of Lord Jagannath, an incarnation of Lord Krishna around whom most of our classical music is woven.

I was again overjoyed by the fantastic response to my blogs especially those on blogspot and wordpress.com. Last month I abandoned my blogs on multiply.com and myspace.com because of the lack of flexibility they offer to their users. And also because, it really does not matter how many blogs you write on. At the end of the day people who like your scribblings, almost certainly will find you, no matter where you are. The only thing that's important is how 'search-able' your articles are on the web. Wordpress.com and Blogger blogs are highly 'Search Engine' friendly and that has helped me in getting that important chunk of regular visitors.

Having learnt a bit of javascript, I attempted to write a piece of code that could generate the download link of eSnips files, at a time when eSnippers were having a hard time in downloading files because of the lack of the download button. It was an instant hit and is quite popular with surfers who hang around eSnips. It is popularly known as eSnips Downloader or eSnips Link Generator. To become a techie is not such an arduous task after all, I have discovered to my amusement. In my quest of building a reasonably good classical music collection I have been to every nook and corner of the web and downloaded almost everything available there. From time to time I make sure to impart that knowledge to my visitors, by posting a few tips and tricks of downloading music from various sites.

Many a times I have resisted the temptation of turning this blog into a full-fledged 'tips and tricks' blog (and letting it become one of the many that are in abundance on the web). I confess, these posts have proved to be more popular than those on the main theme of my blog i.e hindustani classical music. But I assure you this will never happen. This certainly will remain a hindustani classical music blog.

Keep enjoying our musical heritage...till it is alive !!