Dear readers,
RTDM is contemplating on moving from blogspot to a hosted site (where I shall be able to use WordPress in all its glory). I have been meaning to do this for some time now but the horrible effects this will have on people who are linked to my permalinks has made me dither. But alas I am unable to find a way to device a technological solution for this because redirectors work in (as far as I know and I don’t know much) the header section and there is no way I will be able to have “permalink-specific” redirections. [Each individual entry goes into the body section and the header section is reused from the front page]. So people who have bookmarked to permalinks will have to reset their links—–everyone will be redirected to the new homepage where there will be a nifty search box that will enable you to go to the post of your choice.
But for now don’t change any bookmarks. Please.
My new blog is still in a 3/4 created state—kind of like Puri’s Jagannath. I am still struggling with putting my tracker in the footer and most importantly finding a good, cheap, reliable host (Yes I know I am being unreasonable). One of the main reasons why I was tentative about moving is because in terms of reliability, blogspot rocks. You do lose a post or two if you aren’t careful but overall its availability has been beyond reproach. Suggestions are solicited.
My new-look blog can be seen as a work in progress at http://www.freepgs.com/greatbong . People who could suggest improvements in the design are welcome to opine. And extend concrete help. And oh reload it a few times to see the changing headers—there are 9 in all.
[This is also the reason why updates may be a bit slow]
The Greatbong Blog & Podcast 
Cartoon Laws of Physics
Cartoon Law I
Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.
Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.
Cartoon Law II
Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly.
Whether shot from a cannon or in hot pursuit on foot, cartoon characters are so absolute in their momentum that only a telephone pole or an outsize boulder retards their forward motion absolutely. Sir Isaac Newton called this sudden termination of motion the stooge’s surcease.
Cartoon Law III
Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter.
Also called the silhouette of passage, this phenomenon is the speciality of victims of directed-pressure explosions and of reckless cowards who are so eager to escape that they exit directly through the wall of a house, leaving a cookie-cutout-perfect hole. The threat of skunks or matrimony often catalyzes this reaction.
Cartoon Law IV
The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or equal to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty flights to attempt to capture it unbroken.
Such an object is inevitably priceless, the attempt to capture it inevitably unsuccessful.
Cartoon Law V
All principles of gravity are negated by fear.
Psychic forces are sufficient in most bodies for a shock to propel them directly away from the earth’s surface. A spooky noise or an adversary’s signature sound will induce motion upward, usually to the cradle of a chandelier, a treetop, or the crest of a flagpole. The feet of a character who is running or the wheels of a speeding auto need never touch the ground, especially when in flight.
Cartoon Law VI
As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once.
This is particularly true of tooth-and-claw fights, in which a character’s head may be glimpsed emerging from the cloud of altercation at several places simultaneously. This effect is common as well among bodies that are spinning or being throttled.
A wacky character has the option of self-replication only at manic high speeds and may ricochet off walls to achieve the velocity required.
Cartoon Law VII
Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot.
This trompe l’oeil inconsistency has baffled generations, but at least it is known that whoever paints an entrance on a wall’s surface to trick an opponent will be unable to pursue him into this theoretical space.
The painter is flattened against the wall when he attempts to follow into the painting. This is ultimately a problem of art, not of science.
Cartoon Law VIII
Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent.
Cartoon cats possess even more deaths than the traditional nine lives might comfortably afford. They can be decimated, spliced, splayed, accordion-pleated, spindled, or disassembled, but they cannot be destroyed. After a few moments of blinking self pity, they reinflate, elongate, snap back, or solidify.
Corollary:
A cat will assume the shape of its container.
Cartoon Law IX
Everything falls faster than an anvil.
Cartoon Law X
For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite revengeance.
This is the one law of animated cartoon motion that also applies to the physical world at large. For that reason, we need the relief of watching it happen to a duck instead.
Cartoon Law Amendment A
A sharp object will always propel a character upward.
When poked (usually in the buttocks) with a sharp object (usually a pin), a character will defy gravity by shooting straight up, with great velocity.
Cartoon Law Amendment B
The laws of object permanence are nullified for “cool” characters.
Characters who are intended to be “cool” can make previously nonexistent objects appear from behind their backs at will. For instance, the Road Runner can materialize signs to express himself without speaking.
Cartoon Law Amendment C
Explosive weapons cannot cause fatal injuries.
They merely turn characters temporarily black and smokey.
Cartoon Law Amendment D
Gravity is transmitted by slow-moving waves of large wavelengths.
Their operation can be wittnessed by observing the behavior of a canine suspended over a large vertical drop. Its feet will begin to fall first, causing its legs to stretch. As the wave reaches its torso, that part will begin to fall, causing the neck to strech. As the head begins to fall, tension is released and the canine will resume its regular proportions until such time as it strikes the ground.
Cartoon Law Amendment E
Dynamite is spontaneously generated in “C-spaces” (spaces in which cartoon laws hold).
The process is analogous to steady-state theories of the universe which postulated that the tensions involved in maintaining a space would cause the creation of hydrogen from nothing. Dynamite quanta are quite large (stick sized) and unstable (lit). Such quanta are attracted to psychic forces generated by feelings of distress in “cool” characters (see Amendment B, which may be a special case of this law), who are able to use said quanta to their advantage. One may imagine C-spaces where all matter and energy result from primal masses of dynamite exploding. A big bang indeed.
Hey, Well done! Where the hell did you get that Goratna Anticeptic after shave lotion pic from??? Other Laloo and allies pics are great, infact Hilarious! Loved the punchlines – “fodder for thought”, etc. But am missing the Shakti kapoor and Govinda ones :-)…pls get them on
cheers!!
Hi Greatbong
I think the new site looks extremely professional. I love the banners. It template looks like Vulturo’s which I think is one of the best I’ve seen.
@anon Wow that’s a comment longer than the post. First time we have had that around here.
@Surya: Rotating banners—more coming soon.
@Michael: It is based on K2—a wordpress theme. Both Vulturo and I use the same basic theme and then seek to customize on it. I fell in love with K2 on seeing Vulturo’s blog. It’s really very functional.
I got your mail and was going to ask you not to bookmark the site right now. I dont know if I will be on freepgs. However there will be a redirect from here to wherever RTDM finally finds a home.
WordPress.com is new and the dust’s still settling, but it shows a lot of promise.
Else — why not get a cheap account with a shared host that supports MySQL and PHP? Most offer scads of bandwidth these days and because you have acccess to your database you can back up your weblog whenever you like.
WordPress.com does not allow you to customize your templates. And yes I am looking at shared hosts—dont know which one to use !
Fantastic header images. The taglines are even better. I can already sense the impending creation of a fan site and laughter clubs in your name.
I am not too certain K2 works for you. For one it is too formal begining with the font, the layout etc. Very straightforward sort of a theme. Also it has also straight lines. I think curves can result in enhanced user experience when mixed with your verbal viagra. Plus K2 is so common that it has gotten way too boring and I am sure in a few months will go out of fashion. Another problem with the theme is that it still caters to the 800*600 res era. In case you plan to continue with this theme, at least change the width to 1024*768 resolution. Why waste prime piece of real estate filled with your gems on blue colour and drive away lazy ppl like me who hate to scroll? Or are you planning to have advertisements on that space?
Also I miss those pictures on the sidebar. Though I see that you have incorporated some of them in the header images, it is not enough compensation. About the comments check out Shivam’s blog It has a nice service for readers. When a reader types a comment, he has an option to keep track of future comments through email. Whenever a new comment is posted, it will be mailed to the reader. It saves a lot of time for the readers when they do not have to keep checking 100 times a day just to see whether you have responded to their comment.
Have a section for creative hate comments by anons. For instance take a look at my favourite humour writer Maddox and his hate mail section. I love Indian ,another Indian, North Indian, 4WD and recent addition Bengali Guy. Some of them can be very creative and a breath of fresh air in a comment section suffocating with the cloying smell of deserved adulation from commenters who love to regurgitate the same insipid words of praise over and over again. (Sorry. Had to get that out of my system. I am taking the liberty to take potshots at your fans and yourfans while I can. The comment policy on your new blog wont allow me to criticise your other commenters 🙂 in future.)
well done sir!!! (or shud i Saer!!)… Who cares about Maddox now… we have our own cult web-satirist in the wings! 😀
One thing I can clearly find a bit out of place is the header. The pictures are ok. The taglines are cool. However the whole thing put together looks kind of shoddy. That could be intentional but somehow it lacks the bite.
In general I think the design does not come across as one single entity. The bits and pieces by theselves are cool, but not the design as a whole. I am sure that would change as you get the last 1/4th sorted out. All the best.
Great going greatbong! I loved the header pics, though I am not a big fan of K2 yet – its a good theme, but its forever in beta, and that freak never works properly in Internet Explorer lol.
But other than that, I think you should go for shared host. For info, I host my website with ace-net using this plan ( http://www.ace-host.net/specialplan.html)
I took the plan for 2 years, and it worked out around about 100 bucks, but for 2 years it was kinda worth it…. they are usually very good in their support and usually has good reliablity.
I booked my domain through Yahoo though – for 2.95 bucks, I have so many domains in my name now LOL.
I think with the amount of posts that you have, perhaps a 3 column theme might suit you better too – there is a lot of variety in your blogger theme that I tihnk should be reflected in your other space too.
Cheers
Suyog
Well for an artistically challenged person like me, everything looks good 🙂
But,seriously I liked the new page and as Surya said you cant be leaving out Shakti Kapoor and Govinda out from it.
Hopefull, just the location changes and not the bite in your writing.
Keep Thinking!!
Cheers,
HP
I love the sequinned cow, it’s very greatbong. (I’m that pithy (extremely pithy? Nono, I’ll just pretend you can’t pronounce your r’s)
the new look is cool..
hmm.. for hosting.. checkout totalchoicehosting.com
though, i’d suggest you hang over at webhostingtalk.com to get some reviews..
best of luck
Here’s how you could implement a redirect.
1. Replace your blogspot template header to redirect to a special url on your new hosting account.
2. That special url runs a simple cgi script to look at the referral url (i.e. ur blogspot permalinks) and map it to your new (wordpress) permalink.
3. The script then redirects to the new permalinks.
As a bonus, if you generate HTTP 301 redirects all through, you’ll even retain your Google/Technorati rankings!
As for host, look at Dreamhost.com or nearlyfreespeech.net
HTH! Mail me if you need any help.
You must be kidding me, your new blog banner doesn’t have Prabhuji on it. What are you up to? Why don’t you just say out loud that you have lost faith in him?
Dude, the site is very slow and right now it is giving an error page (temporary glitch I guess).
Are you sure the new host can take all the traffic, given your blog’s popularity 🙂 ?
-Rahul
@Chetan: I would love to have some curves (ahem !) on the design—but I dont know how ! My forte is not design—-and I think that my time is better spent thinking up of content than design.
K2 has some cool Ajax K2-specific functionality that I like. I am sure with a contest for WP 2.0 going on now K2 will go out of fashion in a few months. Which is inevitable—it might then leave me with a distinct design.
As to screen resolution, K2 ships out of the box with 800 * 600 and tampering with it gums up the works. Again I dont know much about design and am loathe to spend time tinkering away at it. Also a lot of people (like my parents) do 800 *600 in India.
As to images on the side, I have had complaints (and I understood that too when I was on dialup in India) that the side images cause too many fetch requests which slows down the loading on the mainpage.
Again if someone could do a curved K2 theme so that the box ends are curved I would love to adopt it.
@Freaky Chakra: Thank you
@Voice Within: Sorry to say that the look isnt going to change unless someone gives me a cool K2 mod that allows me to put up 780*200 banners as well as gives me a distinct look. Anybody who does so gets the blessings of Mithun-da and a linkback thank you from my page—if that’s worth anything.
@Supremus: Again K2 does not support a 3 column version yet and I know I am wasting screen estate on higher resolutions. Thanks for the suggestions.
@HP: Did you reload a few times? There are multiple banners and Shakti Kapoor appears in 2 of them !!! Govinda, as punishment for not doing David Dhawan movies, gets only 1 banner.
@Srin: Which just goes to show you should be putting up longer posts.
@Anon: Thank you for the tip
@Antrix: I couldnt find your email add on your blog.
Where do I get such a PhP script? A prelim Google search didnt turn up anything.
Again I have lil’ patience for actually coding a redirect myself–too much work. (because I dont enough of PhP/CGI to start coding from scratch) Takes the fun out of blogging to get your fingers into so much technical stuff.
Also I dont see how my Technorati rank would be maintained. Soon people will directly start bookmarking the .com domain and my referring webpages number will get “split” between the blogspot and the .com.
@Anil: Did you reload a few times? Prabhu-ji is definitely there—I can never lose faith in him.
@Asterix: Thats why I intend to move the site from where it is. But I havent found it going slow for the last few days—but in all freepgs isnt the most reliable service. But its free. Well almost.
GB
Loved the rotating banners, esp since one had Thalaivar on it;)
But somehow the rest of the template looks so..umm…non-GB
This is cool.
The greatbong is moving to it’s own Palace instead of a rented apartment! 😉
Though I like the creativity you have shown in creating the header, I think that you could do a lot more better with Photoshop. If you can send me original photos you used in composing, I could try to come up with something.
Hosting:
1. Dreamhost OR
2. JodoHost (Owned by a Desi, so when you need Tech Support, you will find yourself chatting with guy from Bangalore and yes, they know their stuff)
Both provides very affordable, low cost hosting.
And I was going to suggest you something similar to what Antrix said. Let me see if I can come up with a PHP script.
JD
Mr. Bong, I’m sure you’re as good at coding and stuff as you are at writing. But your new site takes forever to open. AND it makes me puke because I hate Narendra Modi. Could you possibly keep both sites running? Mirror posts and so on?
And perhaps post some real stuff instead of techie talk that leaves me cold?
Uff, cannot open stupid site! but will take everyone’s word for it — i’m sure it’s great. aar boss, please! TOMAR link edit korte loke ektuo shomoy nebe na! oirokombhabe nijeke bonchito korte keu chai ki? 😀
incidentally, amader Cal blog tar ki holo? na tumi, na prero, keu-i kichhu bolchho na…i’m leaving home, and will be back on saturday, if there’s anything you have to say, please mail koro.
For low cost hosting try Godaddy.com.
You are very right in deciding to move to WordPress. WordPress gives much more control to bloggers. Categories and effective comment moderation are, among other things, missing in blogger.
Your template looks good. I don’t like the blue background though. And someone said here that it lacks the bite — i agree wid that. You need to jazz it up a bit more. somehow it lacks the punch.
you can get hosting from godaddy.com or u can choose from many indigenous webhosts. http://www.computinghost.com and http://www.web1.in are the ones i can recommend.
My only suggestion is the glaring omission of Mithunda in a Superman costume in the sidebar. And also yes, the blue background does tend to make it a bit … well sober, I guess. But I have no suggestions on that. And Jesus, where the hell do you get all those amazing pictures that you put in the headers man? Where can I get myself some?
Liked your rotating banner picture idea, especially the witty bylines. However, the title of the site does not come out very well in most of the banner pix.
Parnab’s photo was priceless !
Oh – the new page does take a while to load.
Yes,
Forgot to mention GoDaddy. They are also CNG i.e. Cheap N Good. 🙂
@dreamweaver: Well…
@DKJariwala: I couldnt find your email id from your blog. I cant tell you how privileged it makes me feel to get offers of help—-it means that a lot of people care for RTDM. Megha has sent me a script that works for her blog and I need to look at it. As to the banners, I wanted to know what your suggestions are…..I know(though I cannot do it) that things like fades and stuff look better, one of the principal things about the banners is that they should look tacky (in other words more like a TLV Prasad movie than a Yash Chopra one). Having said that, there are bad crops, errant pixels which I could not remove…..if you could help me on that…But the thing is that I dont want the banners to look professional—if you know what I mean.
Any help on how to get the RTDM text more prominent and a bit jhakas would be appreciated.
@AQC: Modi deserves to be made fun of.
@Rimi: It was while attempting to do a banner for the Calcutta blog that I thought of these banners in the first place. I have only a good banner for the Calcutta blog…and not much else.
@Nipon: I wish someone with template design skills in WP helps me to put jazzy stuff (which should not be slow to load on dialups)
@Gawker: I am afraid of course of making it too jhinchak with a outrageous background….I maybe rationalizing my lack of design skills but dont you think that a rather pseudo-formal design with ridicilous imeeges at the top is also funny.
@Jatayu: WordPress does load a wee bit slow than Blogger( because the page is generated on-the-fly). However the problem in this case is with the free space I have it on…when I make the transition it is going to be on a faster server.
GreatBong:
My email is dkjariwala AT g m a i l
Let’s take it over the email about how your move to the palace can be completed. 🙂
I am sorry that i can’t offer you much suggestions coz i am myself thinking of having a hosted server and i don’t know how. Once you finish, hope you give me tips on how you did it albeit in your unique humourous way….