Routine Order

This blog is anonymous. You might want to know why, and more importantly, how.

I did have another blog which is way more popular, and older, and respected. I still blog there, but increasingly this is my “preferred blog”.


Photo Credit: Anonymous Blogger by zivpu

Fear of getting fired is not the only reason why someone would want to blog anonymously.
I wanted an anonymous blog because:

1. Anonymity sets me free to write about whatever I want
2. I don’t have to stop a thought in its tracks because of fear of blowing good relationships with other people - bloggers and people I know in real life. I can write however I want.
3. My dad and a lot of relatives read my other blog
4. My boss once brought up something I wrote on my other blog, and wanted me to delete it. So what you write on your blog affects work and I don’t like that
5. I don’t want stuff I wrote in the past to turn up in google searches for my name - thus affecting future relationships and deals.

Now that we have the “why” out of the way, lets get into the details of how to blog anonymously, on the cheap. We ignore fee blog hosts like blogger and wordpress.com since you lose a little bit of your independence when you sign up for a hosted blog, and that is not acceptable to us

There is a guide by the electronic frontier foundation about how to blog anonymously. In fact, that was the first guide I referred to when I was thinking of starting this new blog. It provides a list of tips on how to remain anonymous. It is worth a read. However, I was really disappointed in one thing - the link for registering a domain name anonymously does not work! The link points to https://www.onlinepolicy.org/forms/opg-domain-create.shtml which returns a “404: Not found” page. So much for an easy to follow guide. Earlier today, the subject of anonymous blogging came up again in conversation, and I decided to document how I made this blog anonymous.

After the EFF article, I searched and ended up at ask.metafilter.com. There were a couple of posts there, but none of the suggestions were cheap. So I did some more research and ended up with my perfect solution. Read on for details…

Keep reading →

I am in love with LaTeX, the intelligent text formatter. Someday I will write a book with LaTeX. For that day, then, I save the following resource:

Getting to Grips with Latex - Latex Tutorials by Andrew Roberts @ School of Computing, University of Leeds

I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I’m learning all the time. I recall finding it quite taxing when I start to learn Latex, which is why I have started these tutorials. However, I hope that my experiences plays to your advantage, since I hope I can let you into the sort of questions and problems I had when I first learning Latex.

The guide seems quite comprehensive, and should be useful for graduate students who use LaTeX a lot, or better still, want a better alternative to the braindead-ness of MS Word.