Didn’t get a chance to roll them out last night because I wasn’t able to test. Just rolled them out and things look good. I like how the photo albums came out. Eventually I’ll need to go through and give them names, but there’s no need to rush that.
New Site
December 27, 2009
If you see this post, the new site should be up, feel free to take a look :)
I still need to do some work on it, but I figured it is ready enough to be live. I’m working on figuring out exactly what I want the homepage to be, and some of the overall site needs some finesse, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.
Changes afoot
December 14, 2008
Well, I know most readers of this blog read it from their feed readers. However I’ve done enough to the site recently that I figured it was worth mentioning in case you’d like to take a step out of your feed reader for a moment:
- Running on Carrington by Crowd Favorite.
- Various updates to About page.
- Added Articles page to track more in depth posts that I write.
- As previously mentioned, my Photos are now displayed on the site.
- Added Projects page. I’m hoping to release some further projects / WordPress plugins in the near future, but need some time to prepare them. For now, PHP Simple Cache is the only one listed.
- Added Contact form in case you don’t have my email address but would like to contact me.
- Various other back-end items that won’t really matter to any of you ;)
Overall I’m very pleased with the site. I’d still like to make a real homepage for the site instead of it just being the blog, but I need to think about what exactly I’d display on it before I take that step2. I’d also like to add the ability to attach files to submissions on the contact form and add JavaScript validation (there’s already validation, but it’s not overly user friendly)1. Those two will likely come before the new homepage.
1 Javascript Validation added
2 Homepage created
Photos are back
December 11, 2008
Those that know me fairly well, also know that I enjoy taking pictures when I get the opportunity. I’ve had a flickr account for quite awhile now. Anyhow, having the photos integrated with my blog has unfortunately been gone for far too long. Now they are once again part of my blog. So, feel free to peruse my photos at your leisure. Here’s one of the photos from my Favorites album:
I particularly liked this one because of the level of detail and it creeped me out a little that I didn’t realize the spider was on the petal. If you look at the large size of the image, the spider was captured in pretty scary detail ;)
Sorry feed readers
November 17, 2008
Not sure what happened with Twitter Tools. It for some reason did the weekly digest over and over and over. I’ve cleared out the scheduled posts that it made (no idea why it did that) and cleaned out the ones it had already posted. I also deactivated it for now. So hopefully things will stop being wonky.
Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Feed wonkiness
July 25, 2008
Sorry about the feed wonkiness. I was trying something out and decided to not do it. But trying it out let some stuff slip into my feed for a bit. Anyhow, don’t worry, not going to start bombarding my feed with tweets, etc.
Comments and trackbacks
April 18, 2008
I’ve turned comments and trackbacks back on. We’ll see how it goes. Posts made previously to today still have them turned off. If I start getting a spike in spam, I’ll probably turn them back off.
Comments Off
July 20, 2007
Well, I didn’t come to the decision easily, but this morning, I read an article about turning off comments over at Joel on Software. Shortly after that, 3 or 4 spam comments made it through my spam filtering. Honestly, I’m just tired of having to fight spam at all. It’s pretty rare that one makes it through my filtering, but whenever one does, it just annoys me immensely.
This blog is mainly for me to share my thoughts, post pictures, maybe put up a funny video or two. It’s not meant to in any fashion be “work.” Dealing with comment spam is unfortunately, “work.” I don’t get tons of comments anyhow, which I’m fine with, my close friends leave notes on my posts sometimes, and they can just as easily tell me what they thought in person or on their blogs.
To anyone that might stumble across this blog and want to make a comment, I encourage you to write a post on your blog and link to me. I’ll be watching inbound links and trackbacks which for now are still open but that too might change if trackback spam comes back in style, and I will make sure to read what you have to say.
If you don’t already have a blog, then I recommend you set up a blog on WordPress.com. It will take you all of 5 minutes probably, and you’ll have a great blog and you’ll be able to ridicule my posts to your hearts content ;)
Anyhow, take care :)
More feed wonkiness
July 1, 2007
I’m moving forward some with my previously mentioned feed updates. So if you’re a subscriber you might get blasted with all of the items in my feed suddenly being unread. I apologize, but this is more in the direction that I was wanting to go, and gives me more power. Basically I moved over to Yahoo! Pipes. This is especially good for the del.icio.us items that get put into my feed because I can filter out the “toread” items until I’ve had time to read them and decide if I want to keep them tagged or not.
Anyhow, just wanted to give a quick explanation in case anyone was wondering what happened to my feed.
I am a Web Developer located in Richmond, VA. Primarily, I work on the back-end of websites utilizing my database and desktop application coding experience from the past to achieve desired results for the user interface. Recently however I have started moving more into the UI realm, utilizing JavaScript and AJAX to allow for better performance out of the back-end systems.
Installed Disqus comments
Disqus has released a new version of their plugin which overcomes some of my concerns about using the service.
A brief bit of background. Disqus is basically a robust commenting system. It allows for threaded comments (replying to specific comments, better facilitating conversation within comments), it allows for community moderation of comments (if someone leaves an idiotic comment, you can vote it down, after x number of votes down, it will be diminished), and it allows you to track threads that you’ve commented on easily either by subscribing to receive updates, or if you make a Disqus account, you can see all the blogs you’ve been commenting on (blogs that use disqus at least).
So anyhow, they’ve had most of this functionality for awhile now. But my major ‘hang-up’ regarding the service was that if I used it here, the comments would no longer be stored in my blogs database (at least not from my understanding). So that means if I ever wanted to uninstall Disqus, or change services, then I’d lose all of those comments. That just sort of sucks if you ask me. One of the major reasons I host my own blog (vs. using tumblr or wordpress.com) is that I want to hold onto the content on my domain.
Anyhow, they changed that with the new WordPress plugin they released. It now gives all the great features of Disqus, and it sync’s comments with your blogs database. So now I get the best of both worlds. I know I don’t rake in the comments here, but still, it’s a cool tool and I’d like to support them. I’d also highly recommend any of my readers checking out the service and if you run a blog of your own, consider using Disqus to power the comments.
So why don’t you check out Disqus? :)