There are various books that I have read. There are many that have influenced me. The Art of War by Sun Tzu is one book, which has really made me think about life in general and business in particular. Every statement of the book is a complete learning in itself.
There are armies that must not be attacked, positions that must not be contested, commands of sovereign that must not be obeyed.
The simple application in business is that it is not possible to do everything. At times we have the opportunity to divulge our energy into things that we really wanted to do. These opportunities may even seem very lucrative. It is, however, not intelligent to do all that we want to do. It will be like eating all that is served or taking all that is available.
I’ve had the desire to acquire more clients and get more business. The only reason I have stopped myself from doing it is because I know that it may not be possible to keep all of them happy. It will only mean that I may even lose the existing bunch; not a happy thing to happen!
There have been multiple translations of the book and I have two different versions, however I like the one with a foreword by James Clavell, for he has also re-presented a few sections of the book in accordance with the modern times.
Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
One may KNOW how to conquer, without being able to DO it.
I recommend this book to everyone and I believe that it is a great book for someone who wants to be a good leader. It is available for download and reading HERE, without any cost.
What did I first do after I installed WordPress on my GoDaddy shared hosting account?
I logged in to my account and found that I had to update the WordPress installation to 2.7.1 from 2.7. Thanks to the latest 2.7 version, this task is now automated. I remember downloading the WordPress files and uploading them one by one to my server to update it every time there was an update. Slow Internet and the GoDaddy limit of uploading one file at a time made the entire process very frustrating.
After the single click update, the first thing that I did was to change the default theme of the blog. It is important to make the blog look good, and that is one reason I moved from the Windows Live Spaces. WordPress offers hundreds of beautiful themes for the blog, making customizations easy.
It is not difficult to change the theme of the blog. There are hundreds of free and premium themes available online. You can Google for a good WordPress theme and then download it. It needs to be copied to the /wp-content/themes/ folder in your installation.
Once you have the theme copied, It will be available in the appearance menu in your blog’s admin panel.
After changing the theme, next most important thing is to check the URLs of the blog. It is a pity that if you will not change the URL (permalink) of your blog then they will appear in a machine like format
http://shashankrana.com/?p=100
To change these URLs, you need to have a few permissions from your webhost. If you manage your own server then there are no issues otherwise you may want to check before you activate permalinks for your blog. You need to check THIS POST HERE about Pretty Permalinks and then you can also check THIS POST HERE for the solution that I use. There are various ways of making your blog URL look readable. The ones here are easy and fast.
I will continue this in the next post. Do write in if you have any questions or a better way of doing things.
Finally, I have managed to get this blog up and running. I have been thinking about creating my own blog instead of using the Live Spaces service by Microsoft.
I wish to thank a few people for this. Foremost is WordPress, for the most beautiful piece of code that I have ever seen. They are correct, code is poetry! Then I would like to thank Jai Nischal Verma from Blog Oh! Blog, for the wonderful theme that I am using here. And finally, I wish to thank Paint.net, the one software that makes editing images easy. The logo of this website has been created using Paint.net.
There are a few things that I need to do before I can consider this complete. I need to look for a few plugins so that I can ensure that this blog works the way I expect it to. Then I need to see if the widgets in WordPress are working correctly. I need to add the Akismet code to save myself from all the spam that is going to be generated. Lastly, I need to check if this setup will work with Windows Live Writer or not.
So much for it!
