So, one of the things that keeps me on my toes, in a way, is the fact that I almost seem to be constantly changing my site around, be it a brief quick edit in the stylesheet, laying out a page differently, or attempting to overhaul the whole thing and failing miserably. In fact just as I’m writing this, I just changed my header to remove the dark green border from it and the banner image…

I am by no means a proper web designer, so usually I can’t really give a good point of view on how my site looks seeing as I’m the one who made it. Every day I go around and I see some sites and blogs that look really great – the only main issue is that they were made largely using a pre-made theme which they just applied. That’s where my site and those sites differ, seeing as I made my current look from the scraps that is the WordPress Classic theme.

However, there are some people who make sites for a living, and the stuff they create is generally of a very high standard and looks great. While I would love to be able to make a site like that, I have two main issues when it comes to that:

1. I really have no sense of colour. This green I forget what I picked it out from, but I only ever use the two shades of it, and everything else in greyscale. In fact, if it wasn’t for the green, everywhere would be in greyscale.
2. I can’t create images for shit. That means no image buttons, image separators, image background etc. The only things that I did make images for were the banner and those button-bars on the home and contact pages.

While I do hope that my skills will improve as I go along, I do need to aspire to something first…

Anyway, back to the point. You people probably know better than me on how well this site looks and in general how to make a site look good. So I’m asking you lot to critique this creation of mine. And don’t try to sugar-coat anything, tell it how it is. You think it looks shit and makes you want to puke? Say it.

Maybe then I’ll know what to look into changing, and eventually I might even stop playing around with it every other day…

*runs off to play around a bit more with the look*

Google Apps is so much easier to use and manage than Windows Live Admin Center and functionality is much improved and doesn’t have those annoying bits that Windows Live services tend to have.

I had already had some experience with using Google Apps for e-mail after DCU switched over their mail system to utilise Google Apps rather than the very shitty internal system (and I must LOL at staff and everyone else who still uses the crummy old system), so getting used to what was available made me want to switch my own mail even more.

The biggest change in functionality and usability is the fact that I now only have one login screen and I can access all e-mail from several accounts, thanks to the nickname feature for e-mail accounts. I have the one primary e-mail which deals with the account (me) and multiple utility accounts (comments, youtube, babybear) for different types and areas of e-mails that all filter into the one account, whereas on Windows Live each address had to be created separately and ended up having to be a brand new Live ID. This ended up forcing me to use an e-mail client as checking several e-mail accounts via the web one at a time was a damn pain.

GMail’s filtering and labeling system means that my e-mail interface now looks much more like a mail client than anything. Any e-mail that comes in is labelled for a different account based on which e-mail it is sent to, so I can tell easily at a glance which sort of e-mail I’ve just received.

The switchover was pretty painless, I pre-prepared by adding the MX and CNAME records that Google requested so that all I had to do was flip the switch on the old Windows Live records and everything would be hunky-dory. The transfer of data though was another thing. My old e-mail accounts (me and comments) had 15,000 and about 3,700 e-mails respectively in each, that I wanted to move over. For comments, that was no trouble as I just added the account via the mail checker system. But my personal mail was another thing, as the old address was the same as the address for this account, throwing up an error. It took about 4 hours, after having had to add my new mail’s IMAP account to my e-mail client and moving all the e-mails over that way…

However, a couple of niggling issues have cropped up after the switch. The most prominent of which is the fact I now have both a regular Google account and a Google Apps account with the same e-mail address (I kinda also have the same as my DCU e-mail was also added to my main Google account), and so the first time I tried to access my calendar on my Google account I was greeted by a screen telling me I’d have to use my Apps calendar in the future, and any invites would automatically go to the Apps one. Same goes for Google Docs (although I didn’t get a screen informing me so). Annoyingly though, any Google Docs link I’m given opens up in my old Google account rather than my Apps account, and so in order for it to appear in my Apps account, I need to “invite” myself to it…

Another issue is the fact that there is no Reader in Google Apps. My Apps account will be the one getting all my contacts and the like, but without Google profile and Buzz-esque functionality, any contacts I add there won’t filter through for use for me in Reader. I really wish that there could be a process to merge Apps accounts with regular non-GMail accounts that use the same e-mail address. But I doubt that will ever happen since Apps is mainly advertised as a business solution rather than a personal solution (then again so was Admin Center…)

In short, it’s probably one of the best choice I’ve ever made, as the ease of use and functionality is so much better than anything Admin Center could have given to me. I’m now hoping that Apps has some decent functionality coming out soon to make things even better and so much easier to use.

By the way, this means I’m now also using Google Chat/Talk/whatever it’s called. Since I always have a GMail window open, I’m always available, just as long as I’m at my computer

It’s me at my domain is you want to invite me to chat, despite the fact we’ll probably actually never use the service to talk

Anyway, other than that I’ve also changed the links page to use my Google Reader subscriptions rather than trying to manually update it myself. If you’re not there, then that means I’m not reading you, but if I should be and I have in the past, then I probably just forgot when I was re-adding all my subscriptions when I got my new desktop. Kindly give me a nudge to remind me to re-subscribe, and you’ll appear there

I also want to ditch the huge Gallery installation and replace it with something that’s more integrated with WordPress’ functions and the like, and uses WordPress’ commenting system so that people can comment on individual pictures on their own separate pages. If you know of any plugins that do this sort of things, let me know!

So for the first one, I’m kinda lazy and just used it as an excuse to give some more details about that bag of copper change money contest in the last post. Ummm, yea. Watch it and then make your guess on the previous post

Also, 1080p hells-yea

I’ll wait.

…

Back? Good. Now I can talk as if you know what I mean

So, after originally starting out with that fairly shit compared to current standards, major battles of Japanese Pokémon Platinum thing, which at the time was recorded with my regular normal Sony DSC-W35 at a resolution of 640×480 with the sound having to be recorded as it came from the DS speakers meaning I had to shut the fuck up, and edited using Windows Movie Maker; I got a couple of fans. Nothing major really, although at this stage I’m still astounded as to how my Elite Four battle video against Cynthia has garnered 1700+ views in little over a year (obviously the kids were really stuck!).

After that, I was originally going to start the new American Platinum full LP – as in full game coverage and commentary – with that shitty camera, when I acquired my current camcorder, my Canon HF100; and at the same time, came across Sony Vegas 9.^† Sure, full HD may be overkill, but then again it gives me room for error before I edit it down to 720p for uploading. But most importantly, it does have that microphone input jack so I can actually have decent quality game sound. That style of proper LP’ing brought in a few more subs.

But I must say it wasn’t until SoulSilver was released in Japan, and I started that LP that I’ve really started to "take off" in regular viewers. Sure it’s not by much, but at least I know I have people out there that do look forward to what I upload – well, I hope. With a new game, new blind running, and new commentary style, I do kinda feel like I’ve got this thing well and truly sorted.

And now thanks to TheAlmightyBear (aka my gaming machine!) and with a little help from Fraps ($37 well spent tbh!), I now have my other side of LP’ing in what is currently Borderlands – as well as the possibility of some other random PC gaming videos. While this itself does need some work to perfect, I think I have this down as well. At least, I know I do now that I’ve figured out a setting to turn off in Vegas to properly line up the Fraps clips, which are unfortunately limited to 3.9GB each, meaning each particular video is actually about seven or eight files mashed into one. And I hope I’ve fixed the sound level problems for the future as well. Since I thought I could reduce the game volume by reducing the general speaker volume – and that not working – I’ve now gone ahead and turned down the volume for Stereo Mix specifically. At least next time I’m running a sound test I can be sure that’s working.

Agh, gone off the point…

Anyway, I’m probably getting way too ahead of myself here, but I’m actually starting to think about what I need to do when if I get popular. Will I need to start setting up fan pages on places? Official fan groups? An official fan forum? Sure, I’d like it and all, but I just hope that people won’t get too ahead of themselves…

…

Actually, I hope none of my subscribers are reading this…

* looks around *

* legs it *

^† Don’t ask what I mean by "came across", alright?

So, there are a few things that I want to do, and hopefully get as many of them done before Sunday, which is the final day of me being in this country for a while. I probably haven’t yet mentioned it (mainly because it’s not exactly the most interesting of things for you guys ), but we’re – and that means me, my sister, and my mom – are heading to Center Parcs in Longleat for a week starting this Monday. It was a good deal, she pay for the stay, and I pay for the flights and car given that I do have an income and I’m not exactly still living at home anymore.

Except that in order for the car company to charge me, I had to have been the one driving it. Oh well, it’s such a shame I didn’t have to pay for that(!) Although quite frankly, Ryanair were a fucking rip-off. As we were going to be staying Monday-Monday, we have flights for Monday morning. At 6:35am to be precise. It was either that or 2pm, but flying in the afternoon means we’ve wasted our first day, and given how expensive the stay is, it’s better to be tired on the first morning, rather than arriving fresh as a just-delivered pizza yet everyone being closed owing to it being so late.

Anyway, for the flights for the three of us there (Dublin – Britsol): €33. Flights back the week after: €3. That made me think “Oh!” when I saw how cheap it would be. Then came the annoying extras. Two checked in bags – one for me and one for the parent with Aoife splitting her stuff between the suitcases – €40. Fuck sake. If I wasn’t going with my mother I’d probably have been able to get away with my laptop bag with one change of clothes stuffed into it. But I can’t, because generally I’m not allowed to live like that in her company. *sigh*

Then came the next big bombshell – handling fee. Also known as the “charge for trying to pay with anything other than a Visa debit card”. Thirty fucking Euros, you sonuvabitch. And then to top it all off, I was asked to get priority boarding as well. Eighteen more euros. What originally started as pocket change (in my terms) now became a fully fledged shopping list (in my terms – although even then that’s only a week/week and a half long shop). Fuck. You. Extortionate. Bastards.

So yea, heading up to Dublin… hopefully tomorrow. Was originally going to be today, except I kinda went to bed at 6am after a long night of web space related bleh, being in my usual Americanized personal time zone, and the general lack of having anything ready. Which is why today I’ll be getting stuff ready and heading back tomorrow. Or if all else fails, heading back on the 8am bus Saturday morning, going straight into meeting up with the Eirtaku folk and tagging along to the next cosplay photoshoot – and then to Dunboyne.

While I’m on that subject, this Saturday afternoon is yet another cosplay photoshoot. I say yet another in the way that they’ve been happening about every two weeks now. I would have gone to the first, which fell quite conveniently on my birthday which meant I would have had even less of a day to put up with an over-enthusiastic sister (sorry!), only it was cancelled due to the bad weather. The second one fell on the exact same day as the worldwide photowalks, plus I would have had to get said 8am bus. And now there’s this one. If bad weather strikes again, I swear to fuck… *throws bear across room*

I also really need to go record some more footage for my Platinum LP as well. If I do end up doing it, it’ll probably be tonight and then I’ll spend most of Sunday, when not getting ready to leave, editing it into a few videos and then uploading them all very early Monday morning. It’s the editing part I’m worried about, what with it generally taking one and a half hours apiece. Uploading won’t be an issue thanks to 9.6Mb upload (when I last tested it) on Magnet’s fibre network. Hell yes, seven minute video upload as opposed to four fucking agonisingly slow hours. And then at the end of those aforementioned hours, it decided to come up with an unknown error and make me start over again. Fix your shit YouTube. And while you’re at it, either remove the 10:59 limit, or gimme to capability to upload more seeing as I joined back in 2006 when the Director function gave you unlimited uploads which you then revoked and now only give to partners, but all the oldies still keep their functionality! *sharp inhale*

Related to that, I have a new server roommate Samantha. I blame raocow for introducing us. To cut to the point, Sam had no money to renew her webspace soon, and I had webspace available in spades. Seriously, I’m only using about 1.5GB of my disk, and never anymore than 4GB of my monthly bandwidth – so sharing some of my Minimus excess is pretty simple. Once I get shit figured out that is…

And lastly I wanted to start doing vlogs at least once every… well, I say week now, but it’ll very likely end up becoming two months based on a combination of laziness and nothing to talk about. But we’ll see. It’ll have to wait until I get back from holidays because starting it now is probably a bad idea. Plus I’ll probably have a bunch of video content taken while over there, and maybe at the cosplay photoshoot, to edit once I get back. How everything eventually falls back to some common factor.

Wow, I could talk.

Tommy’s Stats

Green: Pageviews, Blue: Visitors, Orange: Returning visitors

My Stats

If you can’t read, it goes from top to bottom: Visitors, Pageviews, Search Engine Spiders, Feed hits.

Yes, I did just post about website statistics. Call me sad if you must, but at least this way I make my feed look like stuff actually comes out of it

Seriously, go there and bask in the culchieness.

I mean it.

Now.

Baby Bear commands you.

Go on, follow the link.

If you haven’t gone by now, you are stupid and so not in tune with pop culture these days.

I’m waiting.

This is the sort of thing that I usually add a META refresh tag to a page for, because people couldn’t be bothered to click a link themselves.

Clicky-clicky!

Update: Yays! Now a published Culch.ie author!

No-one exactly complained about navigation being hard, but I just decided that it was going to get annoying soon. So you can find the links to the previous post/page, the search bar, the category list, month lists, RSS link etc. over there. I might decide to add more soon, although it all depends on if I’m bothered or not. I decided to return back to a similar width to what I had before I changed the entire site from the full width gray based piece of crap to this fixed width lump of green.

As such, the blog and all blog-related pages are now 810 pixels wide (plus padding) and the remaining 130 pixels is for the sidebar. Yes, it’s a shit amount – and I’ll find a way to widen the site without having to redo the header image to give it a little more room without becoming too large for 1024 monitors. Which is exactly what my laptop’s screen size is

If you were expecting something meaningful to come from this post, you are sorely mistaken.

Statpress reports this load of statistical bleh (once I tell the database to show me it):

• Number of posts: 129
• Number of comments: 393
• Number of web host changed: Just the two
• Number of hits (including spiders and legit users): 227,777
  • Those of which that weren’t spiders: 52,688
  • Those that weren’t feed hits: 49,291

I have no idea exactly what the stats mean in comparison, but let’s just assume it’s all good.

Last year was also the year I started Twittering (January 3rd to be precise), and since then I’ve “micro-ranted” 3101 times… You may say I’m an addict, except that others I know have reached 3k in a much shorter space of time.

I’m not turning this into a life story of the last year, so I’m stopping here. Feel free to make fun of the numbers at your whim.

It was a really weird thing, given I’m logged in on one side but not the other. Trying to go manually to the login page just brought me to the dashboard, and logging out wasn’t working.

A quick Google search did the trick, since some people on WP.org were mentioning how they couldn’t log out. Now although the thread I picked up was about people having a lack of a working logout link on their theme, another guy did have my problem:

I’m having the same problem with logout. When clicking the logout link in the upper right corner of the control panel, I get a screen that reads “You are attempting to log out of (website name)”
Then there’s hypertext that says Please Try Again. That link takes you back to wp-admin. If I place my cursor in the address bar and hit enter, I get a different screen that reads “You are attempting to logout of (website name). Then it reads “Do you really want to logout?” Here ‘logout’ is hyptertext and adds www.sitename.com/wp-login.php?action=logout&wpnonce=(numbers)

This has been my workaround… to just place cursor in address bar, hit enter, then click the hyptertext that says logout.

This doesn’t appear to have anything to do with my theme as it only calls the wp-login.php script which is nowhere near my theme files.

Why on earth it screwed up like that, I have no idea. I just hope this isn’t a recurring thing…

So before the upgrade, as you all know, the main page of the blog was located at /blog. And all posts under it started with /blog. That was all fine, everything worked well together and peace was abounds

Now, it’s a different story. First thing after upgrading, everything would work, except the blog home page. /blog would cause IE to say it can’t display it, and Chrome would complain about a redirect loop. All posts, archives, categories, tags etc. were completely fine, just not the main page. Changing the permalink to /rants, as it is now fixes the solution, but now going to /blog leads you to that post I made about the joke K8 and Maxi had about being sent letters by the “Blogging Commission of Ireland”, since it’s permalink starts with blog.

The underlying point is this, and this is the big thing – on my server, I don’t have WP in the root directory, but rather in the /blog directory. Up until half an hour ago (or so), everything worked fine and dandy. Accessing a file that actually existed in the directory brought me to it, and anything else was treated as a permalink and processed. Now, it’s just fecked.

I’d say the simple solution must be to just change the folder in which WP resides, so that I don’t have to change the permalinks to everything and have Googlebot try and re-archive everything all over again (as it was when I originally made the blog a “sub-section” of my site). But I still want to know why on earth I’m having this issue in the first place!

UPDATE @ 16:47 - Right, core directory re-named and blog home re-permalinked. WPG2 gave out a little though, since it’s too stupid to use the siteurl function…

• The Stuff Gallery. If WPG2 doesn’t work with 2.7, then my lovely gallery which works well in tandem will fuck up, causing any posts with gallery embedded pics (Platinum Playthrough posts especially!) to throw errors, as well as the front page.
• The comment form. Apparently, the commenting system has changed drastically in 2.7. And it doesn’t help when the codex doesn’t have any details on how to use the new “simple” function to retain all the bits and bobs from the way it’s setup right now. I like my comment form to be nice and complicated, unlike most people!
• Lots of behind the scenes plugins. It is possible that things like Donncha’s Tweet Tweet, Statpress Reloaded, Twitter Tools etc. might stop working. All three of which would really not help if they stopped working. Without Tweet Tweet, I have no way of getting all those Twitter replies through to my phone – without Statpress I have no way of tracking all your visitors here – and without Twitter Tools I can’t make it a little bit more known that I have posted some utter garbage that I call a rant.

I think the bottom line here is to give it a shot and see what fecks up. I expect a lot of things to go wrong, so if it goes off without a hitch then I’ll be very surprised!

You might be wondering what the “succesor” for Firefox 3 is. Might I say beforehand, that under no circumstances are you to go anywhere near me after I say this: IE8.

Yes, I did just say the letter I, followed by the letter E, and finally the number 8 – all in the same acronym.

Anyway, you may be wondering why I would choose IE8, given it’s part of the highly criticized Internet Explorer family. There are a few reasons for this, most of which relate to ease of functionality with everything else on my computer:

1. Shares feeds list with Windows Live Mail
   Now this is actually quite a major thing. Previously, when using Firefox and I wanted to subscribe to a new feed, I had to open the feed, copy the URL, then go open Windows Live Mail -> Manage Feeds -> Add Feed and then it was done. A lot of work. In IE, I click the Feed button, select the type of feed, and I’m done.
   Yes, I am that lazy.
2. Syncs favourites with Windows Live Favourites
   Not that I really plan on using Favourites all that much, but it’s helpful to have an online backup.
3. Uses the computer’s default Internet Options
   Yea, this is the big one. Firefox always had a seperate batch of connection settings, which meant that whenever I moved from behind the DCU proxy to outside it etc., I had to change both my computer’s settings and Firefox’s settings. No-one ever came out with a plugin to make Firefox adapt the computer’s settings. It was one of the most annoying things about it that I could never fix…

One of the things I wasn’t looking forward to was losing Firebug. That plugin was extremely helpful to me in my designing, and was invaluable. It can’t be used on IE8, but at least they have a native replacement – Developer Tools. Press F12 and there’s a nice Firebug-esque interface, where I can do what I used to do
Its not the same, but in fairness I have to give props for it being in as standard in this beta. They just better not remove it when IE8 proper comes out!

However, now I’m going to have to deal with sites being laid out completely differently now. I’ve already had to set a couple of sites to use Compatibilty Mode and show like they did in IE7. It’s not all that bad, but it is annoying because I can’t set the WordPress backend to use compatibility, and the frontend to not use it. A few sites I have to use compatibility on, or have several layout issues:

• Twitter: Several tabs look out of place. Using compatiblity mode.
• YouTube: Layout completely out of place. Using compatiblity mode.
• phpBB3 forums: Post textarea ends up floating below the right-hand side options.
• WordPress: Title input box stretches down as far as the stuff on the right-hand side goes. The drop-down arrows in the Visual Editor appear twice for some reason.

And I’m sure there other things somewhere that I just haven’t seen yet. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to get used to it – or at least until Firefox/Chrome can do what I want them to do…

I think we all know by now that 500 means an Internal Server Error (given how much I’ve had to mention it recently). Usually it’s caused by the server you’re on being annoying and not working properly. In those cases it’s nothing you can do, so you need to get over it quickly. However, most other times it appears because the server doesn’t seem to like the way you lay out one of your system files, and then decides not to try and serve anything. Annoying!

A few months ago, Donncha shared with me his tactic of getting rid of site scraper bots for good with a little bait and trap. It all worked well back on GoDaddy, but ever since moving to Blacknight all of my .htaccess allow and deny records have thrown up 500 errors… Removing them solved the 500 problem, but alas not the scraper problem.

So, this morning, checking my quite large inbox of new mails (90% of which are new comment notifications) – I notice a little e-mail from Apache. Not the pizza place, but an Apache web server. Another site scraper banned. Didn’t phase me all too much, given how many of them had been caught over time. Onto Twitter, and I notice a little @reply from Reflex, sent Friday evening:

@TheChrisD What up with your site?

My first reaction was WTH? But as I open my admin panel, sure enough there’s a 500 error there. A little digging around later shows that my trap was doing its job in catching the spider and adding it’s deny order to my .htaccess.

Only problem is, not only did I remove the allow and deny base syntax, but either way it caused a 500 error no matter what! So, since Friday my site had been down all because of my attempts to stop my site being scraped…

The whole 500 issue is one of only two things that do annoy me quite a bit about Blacknight. The other being the problems with open_basedir, which prevent WordPress from auto-updating itself because it can’t seem to locate the installation folder…

Either way, once I get the weekend’s backlog of feeds out of the way, I can shoot off a little e-mail to the BN support team with my concerns. Unlike GoDaddy, they’ll get back to me on average within the hour – absolutely thrashing GoDaddy’s previous record of… 29 hours.

PS: Before I forget, GoDaddy tried to auto-renew my hosting with them over the weekend, which thankfully failed Had they got away with renewing without any notification that they were going to charge my card, I would have reported them to my bank for Internet fraud!

PPS: Looks like Wordbook fucked up when I tried to post this… Oh well, Facebook will import the “note” eventually anyway.

Anyway, this whole thing started after Alexia moved from the breaking-every-half-hour-crappy BlueHost to Blacknight. I had always wanted to have my site(s) hosted on an Irish server, but up until recently, it all seemed overpriced in comparison to what I could get on the huge American hosts. Either pay €4 a month for 1GB of space and 10GB of bandwidth, or pay $4.20 a month for 5GB space and 250GB bandwidth? I think the answer is obvious!

Blacknight had always had a special blog hosting package available that would have suited my needs (OK, well maybe not my disk space needs), but the only problem with it was that you could only have a single domain on it, and no sub-domains at all. Given I use stuff.thechrisd.com as my hotlinking domain, it didn’t cut it. Recently though, they re-launched their service with new packages and site and other lark. The new most basic package was roughly the same price (€4.95/month) that was I was currently paying to GoDaddy ($6.99/month), and still came with more than what I’d need: 10GB space, 100GB bandwidth and the usual extras. Not exactly “Minimus”!

Friday

Right, so Friday afternoon, I bought myself a nice little one-year Minimus hosting package from Blacknight Things were looking up as I eventually uploaded my website backup to them, changed the configs, rerouted the domain DNS and everything. The RPWS site looked good, but I couldn’t really say the same for my site… Turns out I had made some changes since my backup from the end of July. A LOT of changes. Which led at first to some 500 errors, then to bigger and worse problems… I was beginning to think that this was going to turn into a hosting hell…

Now before you start thinking that I was all alone with a broken website, I have to commend the support services at Blacknight. There was always a very fast response from the team to my queries, and although I may have whined a bit about something, and I may have been a nuisance, their team always came through to attempt to help out. Seriously, I cannot stress how great their support team is.

Back to Friday, I was getting pressed for time, and couldn’t seem to fix the problems, so I had the DNS changed back to GoDaddy, with plans to re-attempt to transfer sometime next week. Which turned out to be today!

Monday

The first step I wanted to get done was to move the databases to Blacknight and get them setup and running before moving all the files over, so that I wouldn’t lose any Statpress logs, new comments (like what almost happen to one of Reflex’s comments on Friday!), and other things. All seemed to go according to plan, until the database connection errors started…

Onto the support team again just to make sure I wasn’t screwing up with the external options. Blacknight have the handy feature of allowing external hosts to access your databases, so I setup this option specifically for the move. Well, it seems that GoDaddy were having none of that, since the BN MySQL servers were getting no traffic from my GoDaddy site… Epic fail. Hence the few hours earlier where I had a filler page saying “Gimme a few minutes while I sort out databases”. Well, that kinda turned into a few hours…

I sent off a support mail to GoDaddy asking whether they allowed me to access other databases from my server, and whether they could turn it on or not for me. Realising though, that they’d take ages to get back to me, I went ahead and continued with making a new, more up-to-date backup of my site and uploading it to BN. Several hours later and everything is up to BN – and still no response from GoDaddy support!

Finishing Touches

There wasn’t really much else to do after uploading everything. Gallery was giving me a few errors on my site at first, and then was just giving notices, although I do have to blame that on the fact that I had left debug mode on (after the errors on Friday!), but that was soon sorted. Everything else looked fine, and as of now seems to work fine. All in all, today’s move was a LOT smoother than Friday’s!

Overall Opinions

So, based on this move, I’ve changed my mindset regarding a few things:

• Switching to a more local host is MUCH better, even if it may cost more or if you don’t get as good a deal as what you had before (judging by the fact it took only half an hour to upload all my files, while it took 3 hours to download them from GoDaddy!)
• Try not to forget to turn debug mode off…
• DNS can resolve either very fast or very slowly, depending on which you don’t want. When I wanted it to take a while earlier, it happened quickly…
• Remember that your FTP client can hide your .htaccess on you…
• GoDaddy support sucks balls. Seriously big, chocolate salty balls…
• Michele Neylon is one of the best CEOs there is
• The DCU FTP proxy fails miserably when used with my FTP client

So yea, that’s about it. When you read this, try and remember it’s powered by an Irish web hosting company, that perform a lot better than the big, over-the-top American hosting providers.

PS: The RPWS site is still as of now using the GoDaddy services. I still haven’t moved it yet, but then again it’s not the number one priority here!

Home

Things going better, still slightly autocratic, but not as much as before. Got to watch TV alone for the past hour
Guy from Magnet coming Monday to fix patch panel thingy (the hub where the fibre-optic ends and turns into CAT-5 that’s pre-wired through the house) – we sort of had to break open the door because they put a cover over it and locked it without supplying us with a key

Pics

Took some pics today – rainy window, Baby Bear antics, new version of that Lego car, and new avatar
Remind me to upload them to my gallery/hosting tomorrow!

Hosting

The attempted move to Blacknight on Friday didn’t go according to plan… Seems my website backup wasn’t as recent as I had hoped for
DNS is back to GoDaddy for the time being, I’ll try and switch back over sometime next week!

Monies

Since I put Baby Bear’s little ad space, they’ve actually made quite a bit
Maybe it was a good idea to put some on, at least it can help pay for the hosting

Yea, umm that’s all I can think of… Gotta run, 7 minutes of power left!

PS: The post title, is one of my favourite voice taunts from Age of Empires 2

Only a couple of days ago, I changed some settings on my computer so that closing down the lid wouldn’t put it into standby. I wasn’t able to keep track of exactly how many new tweets there had been since I last checked, mainly because TwitterFox could only catch the last 20. There were IM platforms, IRC channels and other programs that took an eternity to sign back in once I started up again. Windows Live Mail would constantly complain and try to bring itself to the front because it wasn’t able to fetch mail while the computer was still connecting to the Internet.

So I changed it all so that my computer essentially stayed on all the time. Now everything comes through no problem. I can put away the computer at night, and then come back the next morning and know exactly how many new tweets there have been (which averages around 250), the e-mails can be fetched as they come in overnight and I don’t have to deal with a moody e-mail client in the morning. The IRC channels don’t bug me for the identification passwords every 10 seconds

Yes, it does consume more power than usual, but at least it’s only a laptop. Of course when I get my proper gaming PC, that’s going to be on all the time – and not just to play games on! Only problem is I still have to get around to ordering the bloomin’ thing, but with such a low credit limit on my card (not to mention the lack of money to pay it off in one go, which my card is set to do), it’s kinda on hold.

Oh, and some more random crap:

• Our new phone books just got delivered about half an hour ago. Only thing is, why do they still print phone books, when it would probably be cheaper and faster to just put it on a CD, a memory stick or online. It’s a technology that doesn’t know it’s dead (via AdjustantReflex).
• Speaking of Mr. Spammer himself, he’s moved blog hosting provider. Feel free to go ridicule him for choosing Blogger.
• This little prick seems to think it’s OK to rip off the “Is It A Good Idea to Microwave This?” videos and re-post them as his own. Well it’s not. Feel free to leave a nasty comment and 1-star ratings on his videos
• I think I’ve finally managed to fix the whole WordPress/bbPress integration thing I had going on over on the Rumble Pit World Series. If you’ve ever added a table to a WordPress post, you’d know that they seem to add each table element on a new line in the HTML code, but bbPress took those extra line breaks and actually displayed them – leaving around 40-50 line breaks before each table. Now I’ve fixed that, althought it did take about 2 hours, and a lot of messing around with the default-filters.php file…
• There appears to be a lot more snow in Pokémon Platinum, than in Diamond or Pearl. I am so getting even though I will have no idea what to do since it’ll only be available in Japansese for about a year.

Think that’s it for now. Stay tuned for the Twitter digest in about 3 hours time

PS: Anyone notice the new fancy dancing favicon yet?

Google

1. Site home page. As expected
2. My profile on MyGamerCard.net
3. My 360voice blog
4. My Rooster Teeth profile
5. My Twitter
6. My Bebo
7. My Wikipedia user page
8. My Windows Live Space
9. My YouTube channel
10. My WordPress.com tag? – WTF?

OK, the results are quite good, most of the hits are sites that I use regularly, or are updated regularly – only #4, #8 I really don’t use anymore, and #10 really shouldn’t be there.

Cuil

This is where things get a little odd… Since I’m also not sure what order of impotance the results on Cuil are because of the layout, I’ve set the results for 2 colums, and am listing the left-hand column first.

1. A non-existent article about me on the Halo 3 part of Halowiki – WTFH?
2. Site homepage
3. My Twitter
4. My blog’s archive for July 9th, 2007?
5. My blog’s archive for the “cod4″ tag??
6. My Blogger’s Choice Awards profile
7. My user page for the Halo 2 part of Halowiki???
8. My user talk page for the Halo 2 part of Halowiki?????
9. My blog’s archive for February 2008???????
10. My blog’s archive for the “games-soc” tag????????
11. My blog’s archive for the “ebay” tag??????????

OK, this is officially fucked up… Let’s go see where some of the better ranked results on Google show up on Cuil…

• MGC profile – Not in the top 100
• 360voice blog – Not in the top 100
• Bebo – Not in the top 100
• Wikipedia User page – 53rd… not wait, that’s a Wikipedia mirror site!
• YouTube channel – Not in the top 100

So as you can see, Cuil obviously has some issues with the ranking of results, if some of the best results from Google don’t even show in the first 10 pages!

I think I’ll be sticking with Google until they can get this mess sorted out…

Thinking back to the beginning, there probably wasn’t much to talk about, hence why there were so many one-paragraph posts in the first few months. Over time, I’ve changed from more of an “online diary” to more of an “online place where I can vent my anger/emotions without any repercussions”.

Alright, I guess that part isn’t exactly true, there have been a few issues over a couple posts before. One of them was the main cause for me losing that low-paying and annoying Internet Café job, another got me ridiculed by half the CA people for at least a couple of weeks, and another almost got me kicked out of my college course (It’s not my problem that the guy is paranoid about e-mail spam!)

Recently though, my “market share” per se of the blogosphere seems to be going up ever so slightly. Although I’m not on par of more known bloggers like Donncha, Grannymar, Elly, Grandad, Primal and many others on their blogrolls I don’t know about – I still am glad to see that I do get a few regular visitors (although that’s mainly Reflex )

Now, I know I don’t post every day (and in some cases not every week!) and I don’t have a regular schedule of posts, but I do still do my best to post at least every couple of days. Sometimes I don’t feel like posting, sometimes I want to post but can’t, and other times I just don’t even think about it – but at least I’m doing my bit. Thanks to all for reading. I’ll keep doing my best to grow and get more known in the blogging community and I hope you all do too

And a couple of small little notes:

• It’s my 19th birthday in 2 days… I really don’t want too much of a big deal made out of it. Hopefully this year it can be completely low-key. Last year seemed quite minor, but it got a little “out of hand”, if you know what I mean…
• I’ve added a few more Irish bloggers to my Links page. If I have you there and there a few details wrong, feel free to let me know and I’ll change the stuff to better suit. And if I don’t have you there, and you want in let me know
• The Microwave show is back on YouTube for Season 4! Watch it here: http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=purDYWSVo54