Somethings Anew

Change is the law of nature. It is indeed.

I write this post today to document some prominent changes that’s been happening recently in my life. Changes that embark the beginning of my humble journey ahead.

I’m in my senior year of college now. Well technically I would be a senior once the classes commence on 1st August. But anyway let me take just one chance to say it out loud. Also with senior year, comes my final opportunity to assimilate whatever this pilgrimage of technology has to offer.

Ok. So the first thing first.

 A new dorm!

This would be the one thing on my list which I was seriously longing for. A new hostel dorm finally! Individual room – I’m on my own here completely. Also a bigger & silent space than my previously shared dorm, I could engage in my work in much better way.

 

Home 2.0 and my workspace!

I moved here on July 1st.

Yeah I should have written about it earlier but wouldn’t it have been a mere proclamation of my unshared excitement? Anyway I had more things to tell you, so I was accumulating content to write about at once.

Outside view from my room at 2nd floor

If you see my blog-post frequency this July, then it’s my 3rd post here. 3 posts-15 days : 1 post per 5 days. Well that’s a reasonable frequency considering my other engagements. Internship work is also on peak. But I should have proper justification for where I’ve been investing my time these days, if not for the readers than for myself.

Wall Art  – 

As soon I set my things up in the new dorm, I had few ideas to customize it. To breath life in the long-abandoned space that resonates with my living style. And what could have been a better way than art to showcase that.

So I started making few paper arts because I love it. I wanted to choose something that was easy to make and looks good while it goes on the wall. It’s been quite a while since I drew anything. Animated characters seemed the reasonable choice.

I was a huge cartoon fan in my childhood – well who wasn’t? The first character that came in my mind was Dexter, for it well signified things that I generally deal with as a student – Science & Technology. So I drew this –

Umm..A mad scientist!

And this is how it looked on the wall –

Ok good!

I couldn’t take my eyes off from this picture the next day 🙂 When I woke up and realized – hmm…I’ve a companion here. When I came back from my work and there was Dexter asking me – So how was your day today?

It was all in my head 😛

But Mr. Dexter was feeling lonely and needed a companion himself. No not a human one (which he had) but someone from his own species. So I thought of keeping him entertained with funky Johnny Bravo –

Were you asking for me?

And then he went on the wall too, alongside Dexter –

It’s Long Distance Entertainment (LDE)!

I was careful not to keep Johnny too near to Dexter. I don’t want him distracted from his scientific endeavor. And there I had one more companion to stare at after waking up the next morning.

Few days later I sent in Mario to investigate how these two were doing –

Hey guys! What’s up? Mario here.

Now these three adorn my workstation like this –

Better, isn’t it?

I really liked making these paper-arts and I was satisfied the way they came up (sometimes I pat myself to boost up). I kept on adding characters for next few days in my list once they started springing up in my mind. Now I have much more things to make. Hopefully I would complete them soon as well.

New Techblog

In the beginning of 2016, I started my techblog ‘HogwartsTech‘ here on Divine_Lifez as a separate category. Creative writing is for leisure times, Science is what I deal with and I wanted to document my learning, my experiences and my experimentations. I published few blog posts since then and here is how they’ve performed –

Post Title	Published On	Total Views	Total Likes
When A Chatbot Said “Women Must Adore You”	28th June	10	6
Thready – Threat Detection Using Drones	21st April	8	7
ClearType – A Font Technology I Didn’t Know About	16th January	41	17

WordPress is a great medium to showcase your work but it’s better if your work deals with a particular domain to reach target audience. It’s an important thing that I learnt through my blogging experience so far. Not only the posts were unable to reach wider audience, they were also less likely to be read by my current readers as compared to other posts.

Well there are some prominent reasons for it too –

• Techblogs are extensive. Most of my posts are usually long but the ones in this category were massively long, usually >1200 words.

• They require certain prerequisites to understand, otherwise it’s all moo – unless you know something about microelectronics, you can’t understand what ESP2866 wi-fi module is.

• Most of the people on this blogosphere are creative writers and they’re awesome. I don’t want to bore them with technical stuffs.

Considering all these reasons, I finally decided to have a separate destination for my technical ramblings. Also I didn’t want to have it on just another WYSIWYG platform like WordPress but rather to be handcrafted, personalized and made through code.

If you’re doing something good, do it in a better way.

Here is what I designed for generating some anticipation before the launch and put it as my WhatsApp DP.

Few people did ask what this OTTID is?

After hours of reading documentation, churning several blog posts, code modifications, configuration changes, making a separate GitHub account and creating a new repository and writing my first blog post, repetitively generating static files through command line, editing phases and running my localhost tens of times to check everything’s perfect before it goes online, finally my Techblog is now live and running –

 

Desktop View

Mobile View

Do check out my new techblog if it interests you at https://mechandansinha.github.io/.

Also if you want to know how to set up your own Pelican site, then do read my Hello World-101 entry there.

Setting up a separate site would provide me more creative freedom in tech domain as well as posting some behind-the-scenes learning through shorter blog posts which I generally avoid here. Also it would a gateway for a sneak peek into my everyday chores.

Renovating Divine_Lifez

If you’re a design enthusiast and if carefully introspect the visual appearance of things you come across, then you might have noticed some layout changes in my blog.

It’s subtle because I didn’t change the overall theme so it might not be apparent. Anyway here’s what changed –

• Flatter design – Flat design is in trend and I love material design. While I was customizing the appearance, I wanted the elements on webpage to be flat. No standing-out z-indexes and no flashy tilting.

And there all lie, flat.

• Color scheme – If you’ve any experience in web designing, you must reckon the importance of color scheme for rendering a seamless eye-pleasing webpage. It felt right to change the color pattern for smooth integration with the changed design.

New and the old.

• Subtitle – People don’t stick to things, they strive for doing something bigger and better. When I started this blog, the old subtitle seemed to be fit.

When life gives you lemon, make lemonade and write the taste

But as the time progressed, I started incorporating newer domains into my writing. The posts were no longer confined to my rants about feelings and emotion but I started writing about various events, my adventures, entrepreneurship and much more.

Thus there needed a change. A change that stands for the conglomeration of all these aspects. A change that signifies my everyday learning in a better way. So there came the new subtitle –

Searching for substantiality in the vicinity of void

Hope it conveys a much deeper and wider meaning to my reader as I intend it to.

100+ Followers –

Your and my beloved blog Divine_Lifez has crossed the cent mark of its followers.

Thanks thanks thanks a lot to all my followers for showing your interest in my naive writing. Your faith is the reason behind the existence of this blog. Your belief justifies my countless hours I’ve spent in creating, organizing and writing the contents.

It’s 110 now!

Also thanks to all the readers to stumble upon my niche on this huge blogosphere. Keep visiting this space to read more from me. I assure you would never get bored 🙂

Creating original content has always been my foremost priority. All my posts are carefully researched for the authenticity of information and they go through numerous editing before getting published.

Also the images I post on my blog are either photographed & edited or designed (for graphics) by myself. I don’t have any problem with anyone using them but do credit or atleast inform me before using them on any other platform – I spend a lot of time (sometimes hours) in deciding the layout, elements and composition.

So Divine_Lifez would stay true to this philosophy of originality. It’s just a beginning.