Few Poems in Bangla

The above are images (partial, click for the larger; sorry, some of them are heavy) of the pages from my Bangla blog. Numerous reasons have discouraged me from posting their further. Reasons? Well, excerpts from a conversation I had with fellow Blong! (Bengali Blogger) Ritwik Banerjee; it went like this:

He said:

Hi . . . . .
My Firefox muddles your bangla blog to boxes of nonsense . . . . which is strange, because I use standard UTF-8 encoding in my setup!
Anyway, it’s been quite some time since I have been looking for a bangla blogging platform . . . didn’t know I could use wordpress for that! Can you guide me through what all to do for this? I mean, how to install the fonts, etc. . . . or give me a link or something that can provide a step-by-step procedure?
It will be a big Big BIG help!

Now; who would like to discourage a fellow Blong from doing it with his own mother tongue? I replied:

Surely Ritwik!…Firstly, its a shame as I mentioned in the first post of this blog that Firefox fails, fails utterly, even Opera cannot salvage. Unfortunately, Micro$oft’s IE7 does a decent job, almost perfectly. Do one thing, in my sidebar there is a long note provided by John Samuel, read that. John’s name links to his wordpress blog, there is a conversation going between him and me somewhere. But unfortunately that won’t help either …as I reported back John.
In my blogroll, there is a link to (well, here it is Avro Keyboard) install this freeware. Installing is quite a chore, you need your Windows XP CD to install fonts; or to make things easier (if you don’t have that CD) download IComplex from Omicronlab.com (the wordpress pluggin which solves the Firefox bug in this page is no use for us WordPress.com users, its for self-hosted blogs) and use it. Also there are lots of fonts to pick and choose; can also use the fontfixer which changes the default Bangla font of your comp from Vrinda (very ugly!) to one of your choice. The help files are quite meticulous.
This software is the best Bangla writing software I know, it writes perfectly (and phonetically, so no steep learning curve) in Word (.doc), .rtf files; I write things in OpenOffice Writer and copy-paste things in WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor. Hit publish and you are left with miniscule fonts! Frustrated again!
You need to go to the ‘Code’ interface of your WYSIWYG editor and increase the value of “font-size” to 14 pts. everywhere…now you understand why I publish so little in my Bangla blog. Or you can begin the post with this code {<font face=”Bangla, cursive”><font size=”4″>} and end it with {</span></font>} and, perspiring, hit ’save’ or ‘publish’.
This keeps your things going, but can other readers read your blog? Readers who use our favorite alternatives to IE? No.

Thats extremely frustrating…

There are bloggers writing in Bengali out here in WordPress, but the above problems remain. Senior blogger Arjun Sen is more optimistic in this regard (but that had been always the difference between us!). Here is how Bangla appear in his blog. To me, a better look is always a priority; and I hate tinkering with codes to achieve that!

John Samuel wrote this to me once:

Hello Life’s Elsewhere,
I am writing this so as to help bengali readers to read your blogs in Mozilla Firefox (and you can remove the ‘Regrets to Readers’).
The major problem is that you have not installed bengali fonts in your Linux. Padma is a mere Firefox extension for the support of Indian languages. I have successfully installed bengali font in my system and have been able to see ur blog ‘Komal Gandhar’- your bengali blog, though I cannot understand it. I don’t know your Linux distribution -but search for ‘bengali fonts rpm’ in Google and install it. Hope you know how to install it. For your convenience, I will write a blog on viewing Bengali fonts in Mozilla Linux in Linux-Share Knowledge if you wish to help your readers and you can give them the link.
Do tell me if you have any problem installing the rpm. When once you install the font simply restart Firefox.
Hope this will help you
Thanks

But our favorite blogging platform is working in a meticulous way! See this!