Long long ago, quite some time ago, before the whole hosted blogging thingy, I was having one of the thousands of wordpress.com hosted blogs. http://cruisemaniac.wordpress.com was the URL.  Then, BCB2 happened… and all those wonderful people suggested that I could also move to a domain hosted blog and that would look cooler considering that my pseudo-name “Cruisemaniac” was kinda popular at the time (or so they said )

And so, I went about finding who the good webhosts were and how much I would have to shell out for the domain + space and all that… I cornered it down to bluehost for my hosting and when I started the domain booking procedure, i popped in the domain name and poof… it was not available. I had the horror of horrors in finding out that the term “cruisemaniac” and hence, the website cruisemaniac.com was owned by a porn-star… Nope, that would not be me… but then yeah, it was owned by a d*&k-headed porn star (d*&k-headed… so to speak!) So I went out, bought the domain “thecruisemaniac.com“, setup my blog ranted here, and totally forgot about the domain name… Over a period of time, due to strong and unrelenting perseverance, the term cruisemaniac has come to be identified as my identity and not that of the pr0n guy!

So, winding forward to a few weeks back, when I was fooling around on the internet, I remembered the domain name and checked to see what had happened to cruisemaniac.com and to my surprise, it gave me a 404!  Checking the whois info told me that it was not renewed and was going to get released into the freepool in a weeks time.  After discussions with our honourable web-expert Mr. Prashanth, I set a backorder on godaddy for the domain.  Close to a week after that, on a cloudy, cool, monday morning (scenic descriptions eh ), Godaddy confirmed the domain for me! Which is jhakaas!!! With a tweet to w00t for victory, the domain became mine and I have now smoothly migrated the blog from thecruisemaniac.com to cruisemaniac.com and this is where you are currently.

And I hence, proclaim, I AM Cruisemaniac!

So yeah, there goes, the story… A lived-happily-ever-after ending to it

Now that the happy story is done with, there are a few things left to be done: I have always wanted a landing page as I dont like the root of the domain to be where my blog is hosted. The landing page is still under construction and I hope to have it completed by this weekend.  I also neeed a nicer theme for hte blog… Not that I dont like the current one, but I need a more elegant one. If any of you have pointers to some good looking themes, do drop in a comment and I would really appreciate that.

And most importantly, now that the entire website has been moved, if there are any broken links, missing files, do let me know…

Till the next post, chao!

P.S.: I will not take any criticism on the pr0n star sh*&. I have had enough of that already!

P.P.S.: I am Cruisemaniac! I AM ‘THE’ CRUISEMANIAC!

But then, here’s the extended version:

Last week, Bengaluru’s popular techblog controlenter had a post on requesting for twitter usernames that were inactive.  Link to post here.  So, as the process goes, You send a mail to username [at] twitter [dot] com with the following data:

1. The twitter username you want
2. Your current twitter username
3. Whether you want to use the username (if allocated to you) with the current account or you want to use it as a new / separate account.

I dug around twitter and noticed that the username @ashwin was unused until that moment with just 2 tweets and about 3 follows and 1 follower.  Typically – UNUSED as per twitter’s terms.  And off went an email to twitter requesting that they give me the twitter username @ashwin.

And five days later, today, when twitter stopped logging in with my username @cruisemaniac, I thought I’d been “phished“.  But then, surprise! surprise! My username had changed.  Twitter had actually allocated @ashwin for me. Thanks guys for that!!!

To be the only @ashwin on twitter is awesome… and so with this tweet, I changed my twitter handle on twitter:

My Tweet indicating change of twitter handles

I did receive a lot of mixed reactions… @the100rabh paid homage to @cruisemaniac! @dkris and @pcsbox felt that the change was good… Some more tweets happened that are on twitter search.

And there ends this happy story

But yeah, the post is not over… The technical part of the twitter-username-change still remains:  If and when you are allocated your new username by twitter, the old one is lost.  If you want, you can register again using a different e-mail ID and hold your old username till someone else feels that you’re squatting on the username and requests twitter to release it for him / her.

I do have @cruisemaniac booked and held tight… Fingers crossed!

For all that followed the @cruisemaniac and felt that the tweets were worth listening to, @ashwin will still rock the show and rule the roost! B-)  And for those who dont know me yet, I’m @ashwin on twitter.

-Chao…