The Making of "Kharagpur Online"

It was one of my dreams to do something about Kharagpur. I thought either to publish a Photographic book or to write an epic (Bengali) on Kharagpur town. I went to Oxford Book stall couple of times to read and buy concepts on recent photographic books on Kolkata, went to a professor of kharagpur college, who is also a writer of Kharagpur history book. I promised him to give some of my photographs for his book but I couldn’t as I had to fly to US suddenly. I feel bad for it.

While blogging in 2007, I searched Kharagpur on Net. But I was disappointed by the result and thought to post Kharagpur Series in my personal blog. I started with this one. But this effort was not good enough to capture the wonderful city.

Last month I decided to launch a dedicated site for Kharagpur.As mentioned in this blogpost , I havnt got www.kharagpur.com domain and asked for suggestions and http://www.kharagpuronline.com/ was unanimous choice. Thus in the eve of New Year I decided to launch it through famous web hosting site “fatcow” and registered “KharagpurOnline” on 31st December 2008.


Now it was the time to design and shape this site. I am in blogsphere for couple of years, but I had no idead about website hosting. It was a challenge for me. I took help from couple of friends. Chaitree who launched http://www.chaitreebasak.com/ helped me a lot with the concept of dream weaver and html pages. Ananda was always a helping hand for me and this time it was not an exception. He helped me to install wordpress and with his valuable critics. Aritra took it one step ahead. He is the first registered author for this site and started writing in the Education category. Finally Pabitra took some amazing pictures of our town to enrich KharagpurOnline. My sincere thanks to Chaitree, Ananda, Aritra and Pabitra.

The design was a delicate issue. I was not happy with the free CSS templates as it is not interactive(or I havnt found a better one), neither I was interested to make it totally in Wordpress. In first week, I tried in many possible ways and after all permutations and combinations I merged these two concepts. First Page, Info Page and Contact page are in CSS and all rest topics (which I want to make interactive) are in Wordpress themes. This took out the overhead of complex file management in control panel and I can really focus on content. This merging concept has given me enough freedom to design in dream weaver as well as use wordpress to its fullest extent. It has given a flavor of a website as well as an interactive blog in a combined package. I am happy with this initial design and launched “KharagpurOnline” on 11th January 2009.
For site content, I approached couple of people to use their photos and videos. Some has given permission while others remained silent. Then people from kharagpur slowly involved with KharagpurOnline. We created a community in Orkut. Started promoting this site, gathered some information, and posted some photos. Our journey of KharagpurOnline started in this fashion.

Please visit this site and write your suggestions, comments, feedback.

Post of the Month : David's Tips for Free Writing.

There are many aspects of blogging, one of them are obviously to enhance our writing skills, but if we get ready made tips in a series of posts, that’s really helpful. Yes, David Mcmahon a Melbourne based journalist, photographer and bestselling novelist, came up with a series of amazing posts in his blog for aspiring writers.

David emphasised in one the post that – “This series of posts is not just for people who are writing novels or other books. It is for writers of any description - essayists, those doing creative writing courses, or any of the many niches for writing, photography or blogging.”

He has discussed following topics in his blog so far. I find all of them extremely helpful, may be helpful for you also. I thank David for sharing so much valuable experience in free, helping and motivating others and cheering us constantly.

How Do I Get A Monopoly On Query Letters?,
So You Feel Like You’ve Hit A Brick Wall?,
Don't Drive Yourself Too Hard,
Gotta Go With The Flow,
Let Me Help You With That Book You're Writing.

Here go some of the tips I liked most in his Telling Write From Wrong series.

“To those writing books or novels, my first piece of advice is to write a short synopsis. When I wrote my first novel, Vegemite Vindaloo, I started with great momentum. But I didn't write a synopsis, so I got derailed very quickly. I could not figure out where the plot was going.”

“First sentence ain't happenin'? No worries, just start with the first thought that comes into your head.”

“Recognise a moment of inspiration. Write it down. And when you are back at your computer, allow it to guide you. Sometimes these ideas ``write'' themselves, but sometimes they need a lot of sweat and toil to translate into words on a computer screen.”

“..there is no "correct" wordage on a daily basis. A steady output works for some people, while bursts of frenetic writing interspersed with several days away from the plot works for others. You write what you want to write, when you want to write.”


This is my choice for best post for the month of August-September 2007.