Splitting A Blog Into Two Bloglets

Couple of days back I felt that I had to split my blog into 2 bloglets. I planned this for about 10 minutes and then got going. I decided that blog posts of a certain kind (or topic) would remain in the original blog (blog A) and the rest would go to blog B.

It wasn't as simple as that. There were some posts which weren't easy to decide as to whether they fit in blog A or B but then since the only person who would make the call was me it was simple.

A little bit into what caused me to split my blog - I felt that some of my posts were largely providing information - for example about laptops or mobiles or best places to eat or the railways booking policy or about an interesting book or blog I read recently etc. In such posts the value add I did was minimal to zero. I just provided the links. I moved all such posts to blog B. They were and are useful for me to refer to. 

Blog A (current blog) retained all the posts where I wrote my content and where external references were not much. There are some posts in this blog (A) where there are plenty of quotes and each of those quotes would make me think. Quotes that made and still make me think while writing or after writing ended up in A. And that's the way I want things to be. About 70% of all posts were moved to blog B.

Maybe in future i may go for one more round of disinvestment or pruning. 

Now as to how I moved the 70% posts - I did not now that I would end up moving 70% of the posts. At the end of the exercise it turned out to be so many: 

1. I took a backup of the blog and restored the same into blog B. So now blogs A and B were identical. While restoring I did not choose the "automatically publish on import" option. So for the general public the content was only available in blog A.
2. I chose blog B as my reference blog. Those posts that I knew would definitely be in A (by filtering on certain label values), I deleted from B. Similarly those posts that I knew would definitely be in B, I selected using labels in blog A and deleted them from A.
3. For the rest of the posts, working in blog B I went through each post and decided whether it would remain in blog B (in which case I deleted in blog A) and if not I deleted in blog B. Occasionally I deleted the post from both blogs when I thought I did not want that post at all. To make my job easier, I had opened two browser windows with blog A in the 1st and blog B in the 2nd window. So I could switch tabs and work fast.
4. Finally there was the issues of URL references - meaning some of my posts would refer to other posts of mine. Both posts were originally in A. After this splitting exercise when the referred post, which could be in blog A or B, was in blog B then the 404 error would come. So I had to change the references in referring posts to blog B from blog A. 
1. Initially I used a free online broken link checker which listed a whole bunch of broken links, some of my own posts and some external. But these were too many. 
2. I then searched within each blog separately for "blogA" (assuming that my blog address was blogA.blogspot.com). That gave me a bunch of posts in each blog. Some of those references would be Ok where the post was not migrated to blog B. Others would not be OK and the references would have to be changed. 
3. I would open each of the posts that came up from the search and then search inside the post for blog A and click on the hyperlink. If it opened successfully then fine, else I would search for that post in blog B and find the new URL and replace. Often it would be just easier to replace the blogA with blogB in the URL and then click the link to see if it worked. If not, of course go to blog B and find the correct address. Occasionally the referred post wasn't there in either blog A or B. God knows where it went. In such cases, there were 4 or 5 such posts, I just removed the reference.
4. This would still leave external references which may not work and also some of my own posts where the actual text in the hyperlink was not the URL but something more sensible. In such cases, seach for blogA would not show up. I would have to run a broken link checker to identify the remaining issues.
5. Having gone through this exercise I would have preferred it if Blogger gave an option to identify posts from blog A and also the option to move the selected posts to blog B 
1. while also deleting the exported posts from blog A and
2. changing the URL references in both blogs to the exported posts. Maybe such an option exists and I was not aware of it.

Anyway, version 1 of the bloglets A and B are now live. It took me about 30 man-hours (over 3 days) to do the complete exercise. The size of the exported blog was about 10MB. It is rather surprising that the export files of blogs A and B after the exercise are both about 5MB despite the fact that blog B has 3 times more posts than A (remember posts in A:B = 25%:75%).

Blog B is named Calmisc.

Rapes In Delhi

I read a couple of article quoting Delhi police's insensitivity towards rape victims. 

• http://www.firstpost.com/living/from-the-delhi-police-six-reasons-why-women-deserve-to-be-raped-269957.html
• http://www.tehelka.com/story_main52.asp?filename=Ne140412Coverstory.asp

You are entitled to leave your house unlocked when you go on a vacation, such an act is certainly not illegal. You may also insist that your house not be burgled then. 

But if thieves do break in to your apartment, the police would have to look for the burglars and also explain you to lock up your apartment when you leave town. If the police tell you to be more careful, is it derelict of them? If their only action is to tell you to be more careful, then it certainly isn't acceptable. But apart from doing their duty of catching the victim, they also tell you to be careful in future, would we cry hoarse?

If you have Rs100,000 in cash, would you drink with strangers? You won't, right? Why would you, a woman, drink with strangers when you intrinsically have with you something very valuable?

If you still had to carry that amount of cash, would you carry it in a revealing package? If you did and got robbed, would someone be wrong admonishing you for being stupid?

Does it mean that a robber or rapist is right in what he does? Of course not. Yet, it is prudent to be careful, right?

As to the "callous" nature of Delhi police who say that women sometimes exaggerate about being raped, do read this. Do you think the woman was raped?

Women sometimes confuse rape for being unhappy after having sex, maybe because the expected payout did not happen. How many stories have we read of women who lodged a police complaint that their boyfriend raped her because he refused to marry her. Is this rape? Only a convoluted mind would consider this to be rape.

Let the authors of the links at the top understand that it's not just the police (Delhi or elsewhere) who seem to be callous. It's the women who sometimes (note my use of "sometimes") also not seem to know what rape means. While the act of rape is absolutely abominable, not every act of sex where the woman wakes up unhappy is an act of rape as well. For a more detailed understanding of this subject, I would recommend this link.

A Very Nice Post On Eve Teasing

I read a nice post about the life of a woman in India in the context of eve teasing. Unfortunately the link is not active.

I wonder how one can say "you stared at me". Is staring a crime? Let's say you pass by a house. And you stare at it. Can the house owner or the tenant sue you for staring at it? But supposing you climbed into the house or threw stones at it? Now that's a different matter. You have committed a crime. 

But staring hard at the house? Were you gently admiring or staring? Depends. One can interpret either way. More importantly if something is public, it will be viewed (or stared at or admired depending on who is talking). If WSJ or BBC don't want people to read something that's on their site, then they should not make their site public. Protect it with password security or remove it from the public web altogether.

I don't agree with the culpability of staring.

None Of The Men Are

"None of the men are in US custody and their whereabouts are unknown.". This is an excerpt from an article  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13194861 on Mumbai 2008 attacks.

While the usage "None of us is" is considered generally to be more appropriate, the "None of us are" form is also used frequently.

The use of "are" and "is" when used in conjunction with "None of" has been of interest to me. A friend of mine earlier used the "are" form. And I would often tease her "You is a fool and so are your uncle". She couldn't stand it and after a lot of deliberation switched to the "None of us is" form.

It was amusing to listen to the pregnant pause which would follow her "None of us", when she would figure out the right verb and continue "is ...". 

So when I saw this "None of the men are..." in the BBC site now, I smiled.

Analysis, Lack Thereof

I realized one thing while reading news these days: 

• Gold rises because of inflation worries. 
• Dollar falls because of inflation worries
• Invest in real estate now because stocks are not doing well
• Invest in gold now because stocks are doing well
• Euro falls against yen because of political unrest in northern Africa
• Mid size IT companies in India will go through a consolidation phase because Apple's IPAD has little competition. (Well I am exaggerating a little here)

I mean what kind of headlines are these? Mostly they seem to report data. And some opinions which hardly prove the assertions. Articles which probably shouldn't even find a place in a blog. And we go on reading these? Why don't we get an in depth analysis to justify the statement being made?

When we make an assertion the first thing that is expected is: do we have data to support it? When we say A (some result) happens because of B (some cause), A and B should have a high correlation. 

What does a high correlation between A and B mean?

• When B rises, A rises and vice versa
• The relationship between a change in B and the resultant change in A is stronger than the relationship between C (any another possible cause) and A.

I am reminded of a survey conducted in a women's college and in a men's college. It was found that on an average alumni of the the women's college had 2.7 children each while those from the men's college had 2.1 children each. And a conclusion hence was drawn that women had more children then men.

Now number of children that a person has (let's say, result Z) was compared with with gender of a person (X = women, Y = men). And it was found that Z for X was 2.7 and Z for Y was 2.1. Now what's wrong with this analysis?

The problem is that Z (number of children) does not depend on gender. If the survey had taken a wider sample it would have obviously found that Z is the same for X and Y. (Common sense says that it cannot be different for X and Y). In this case, it was easy to identify the flaw.

But what do you do if the issue is more complex? When common sense may not be able to help?

• Look at larger/wider samples and see if the conclusion reached initially is still valid.
• See how Z correlates with other possible factors P, Q, R etc and see whether Z correlates better with any one or more of them.
• A good correlation (Cause and effect) has to satisfy the rules mentioned in bold and italics above.

I wish the analyses in the articles would do this before reaching a hasty conclusion.