Kolkata Musing is an Indian lifestyle website, news and technology blog founded by Partha Bhattacharya in 2006. The website’s main focus is interesting news in the city of Kolkata and elsewhere, but it also covers news and developments in career, travel, food-n-health, web technology, and online video.
The Past
Kolkata Musing – or KolMus to many of us – has a chequered history going back 8 years. It started in early 2006 when Google was still in two minds whether to buy YouTube, and when few people knew or cared about blogging.
Since then and till April 2014, a total of 964 posts were penned in KolMus. The bulk of these articles, 932 of them, were written between 2006 and 2009. Only 32 appeared in the last 3-1/2 years.
Why this apathy?
KolMus was a dream nurtured for a long time. We always believed people wanted to read articles that were engaging, based on facts and passionate. Passionate about truth. Passionate about the needs and desires of the people.
However, despite ‘heady’ intentions KolMus gradually stagnated. It did so because – you rightly guessed – there was no steady flow of revenue. After all how much could a blog earn from only Google AdSense?
A New Beginning
Times have since changed. People today depend on the web for information, for knowledge, for career, for living their dreams. The onus is now on the content crafters (to borrow the term from Buffer) to help people get what they want.
That brings us to this born-again saga of KolMus.
An effort for rejuvenation is now on. However our journey to future has to pass the test of monetary wherewithal to sustain and grow. Despite odds we are hopeful of making KolMus a true destination for the discerning readers on the web.
Come. Let’s join hands.
Write in Kolkata Musing
If you want to contribute to KolMus columns you are most welcome. We have put together a small guide here that will help you understand how and in which way you can contribute your articles for publishing in Kolkata Musing.
Please go through it. And join us as a valued contributor.
Anomalies in Older Posts
This has to be told.
Kolkata Musing journeyed from being part of Blogger 8 years back to being a self-hosted WordPress website it is today. In this long travel there are inevitably some leftovers you may find confusing while reading the posts, especially the older ones.
Here are three that make up the bulk of confusion:
- At the end of many old posts you get to see an invitation requesting to enlist for daily posts by email (see image below). The link leads to the URL http://www.feedblitz.com/f?previewfeed=163758, and if you click on it you’ll likely get a 404 error page at FeedBlitz. The reason is KolMus no longer has any feed working with FeedBlitz. This URL is not working, so do not click on it. Meanwhile I am working on removing it altogether from the posts.
- In some posts you’ll find that the images are not there. This has happened since the URLs of those images no longer exist. See the following image.
- There are just too many categories in the blog – a princely 33 of them. What’s worse, many posts have multiple categories. This is unhealthy for any blog… and KolMus is no exception. To make amends we are re-allocating all the posts to a maximum of 8-10 categories. At the same time we are going to try and stick to one-post-one-category rule from now on.
Finally, if you have anything to say about the blog or wish to contact us for any reason, fill in the form here.
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Image Credit: The background image is that of the Vidyasagar Setu, a cable suspension bridge across the river Hooghly connecting the twin cities of Kolkata and Howrah. It is apparently taken in one wintry morning of December 2007 – most likely from the Princep Ghat – and the shore on the other side belongs to Howrah. Credit for this image from Flickr goes to Saugata Dutta and is produced here courtesy Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.