As you can tell, if your not reading this post in RSS, I’ve changed a few things. Namely just making everything bigger; bigger fonts, bigger header, and flexible width. I think it’s been enough time for me to move to flexible width site after many discussions (mostly w/ Jared) about how sites should not be fixed width.
There are still a few things I need to fix but I’ll probably pass since I rather not spend the time into the minor details. For example Safari renders the “Activity” and “Tags and…” buttons differently then Firefox, the buttons are lowered 10 px for some reason. Another bug that I hate and the reason I never went to flexible width is getting the rolling archives to properly fit within the content div, if you look closely you will either see a gap or an overlay.
Some stuff I want to add is:
I’d also like to thank Jared for making the tagboard plugin I’m currently testing out for him. It’s pretty awesome.
I figured that I should be the one to gain financially from my blog so I killed the shoutbox and put in an ad box; that will show those darn tagboard spammer bots. … Read More »
April 21
I knew my hits were increasing for the last 2 months but never this much. wp-stattraq says I have about 21k already for this month and my logs for my domain say 200k, in which 20k are due to the tagboard. What’s more crazy: I had 441k(webstats) last month. What did I do last month? And why the huge difference between stattraq and my webstats? Other then tagboards and stylesheets and such.
I am spring cleaning a little.
I took the links out of the right side for two reasons: 1) Because it was an eyesore for me 2) I love Del.icio.us too much, especially since they started to show flickr style weighted tags. I know it’s sort of a nuisance because my links were one click away and now they are two but this way you are now drawn to all my links. Which are categorized so well (I plan to clean up the tags a little).
I created a Link Log. A blog for all my links, it will update every time I add a new link to my del.icio.us account. I did this with an awesome service from RSS Digest. They closed down shop right now but I found a little work around. I will write a full review on RSS Digest when the new version comes out but I do have to say it is excellent, easy and innovative. Innovative because in the near future users will be able to splice there feeds together, filter and more. I can’t wait. I originally created a plugin to take care of the rss feed with magpie from the WordPress install but I soon scratched it because I couldn’t figure out why it was getting screwed up with another RSS plugin; probably because I was sharing the basic code. Maybe later I will fix it and release it, although there already are a ton.
No flickr Zeitgeist. I took it out because it continually loaded while the page was open, something I didn’t like and I had to get rid of in order to get Jared’s tagboard plugin to work properly. Something that still isn’t because in firefox, the iframe is off vertically.
Soon I will create a new theme, I don’t know if I am going to what until K2 but I will get something together soon. It will be dark.
A lot of people are using my theme and I just saw one today that made me proud. Probably the best I have seen because he is using everything installed in the theme except the top commenter’s plug-in.
But I still have to do a couple things:
1. Someone pointed out today the emoticons for the tagboard were from Spymac, which they are, something I did a long time ago but never took out when I released the theme. Dumb move on my part.
2. Bug Alex to change my theme on the theme competition blog. I asked him a bunch of times but since I gave him a flickr account he owes me.
3. Help people more that comment on my blog.
I finished my theme this morning, surprisingly it didn’t take too long to finish. You can check it out on Tim’s blog here, don’t worry you wont notice it if you go to his site normally.
My theme is a little weird because it is a drop in theme but I included a lot of features.
The tagboard is one; when you drop in the theme the files it should work but a couple files might need to be chmoded. During my tests I never had to chmod the files but just a warning. I also included a true drag and drop Gallery and Gallery2 integration, the same thing on this site. I knew I had to this with the theme since 50% of my visits to this site are from Gallery integration of Wordpress; for the fans. I also included the Archives file that I use but it needs installation though, just drag it in the root directory of the blog; I couldn’t get it to work in the theme folder, oh well.
Anyways, I now get to play with my PSP…after work of course…more to come on that later.
I hadn’t committed to enter the Alex King Theme Competition until today when I started working on it. Last night I had the great idea to give Gallery and Gallery2 integration files with it so people could drop the theme in there theme directory and drop a couple files in their gallery folder and then they are done. I will be using this look exactly except the switching header and i will integrate a tagboard which is cool since the tagboard works off flat files and there is no installation involved. I wonder if the 28th deadline means 11:59 tomorrow or 11:59 Friday. Either way I will have something ready. You can get to the theme thought the striped theme.
I wonder if I will beat Jared.
I want to write a lot right now but as Jared knows, see tagboard, I am very busy with the server that I am trying my best to setup. I so need to create a To-Do list, like Stryker has. I have a lot on my plate right now, all tied up on the internet; server, theme competition, server, server, and new website.
Today I hope to post on a theory I have but right now I need to follow up with a post I had earlier.
I fired up FireFox this morning to find out they only set up a proxy.
So I just had to go to Internet connections in FireFox and tell it where the proxy script was that they had setup. And that was that, I am back to running FF. I guess I had nothing to worry about, but now I think I worry more since they can now track my every move, including the entry of this post, a little better.
I am new to the whole Bloging thing compared to some and as I was late to blogging, I am late to the game of RSS readers. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and what it does it, in my own jargon, is give a flat text file for your blog; containing your posts and for some blogs, mainly wordpress blogs, we give RSS feeds for comments. You can view my RSS feed here. But you would never really want to read just this page now would you? This is were a feed reader comes in. The most popular news reader is Feed Demon. But what I use is NewsGator, what it does is give me access to my feeds online, which I never use, synces my use, and it integrates with outlook to deliver messages to my inbox with an RSS homepage to easily view my newly updated feeds, including images. What I used before NewsGator is my RSS homepage, just click the RSS/NEWS link above. Okay you understand RSS and readers, right?
Well, what I wanted to talk about is how RSS is killing our community because if I receive all my info in outlook or on one page on the web to accommodate me, I don’t go out to the users blogs. I wouldn’t notice a style change, a new picture outside a post, a tagboard, and I would hesitate to even comment. Currently I find myself not commenting as much as I used to, not because of my schedule but because I don’t want to go outside my RSS inbox with my huge arena of RSS feeds. Before I checked the blogs to the right 5-10 times a day, just to see if they updated anything and if they didn’t I would comment to encourage or comment just out of pure boredom. Now I have 30-40 feeds I read in quarter the time and I find myself never going to actual sites. I don’t even have to go to my own site, with press-it and getting my own comment feed, I have no need to. So what is your experience? I will still use my aggregator, and I would highly recommend one, but I encourage something that I have been failing in, you still need to visit those sites and comment more often.
Another observation: How long will RSS readers exist for major sites? Because most major news sites offer RSS feeds and without a homepage visit how will they make money without those ad banners. Or are we going to see adverts in our feeds in the near future.
