Category Archives: Site

Site tweaks? Not so much.

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OK, so I was all set to get my blog moved over to a more lightweight theme, considering modding the Indigo theme by Kaushal Sheth. I got it working, but there was something wacky going on with the sidebar widgets and I didn’t really want to mess with all the work of trying to fix it right now. Maybe eventually, but I have yet to find a theme that works better than K2.

I did remove the Flickr photos from the sidebar, although I doubt anyone noticed. Content soon. I also have an update on the weight loss (thought I forgot, didn’t you?).

Dear Reader (I Know You’re Out There)

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So I think that I get tired with blog designs easily because I am starting to tire of the all orange action that I’ve got going on here. I like it, but not TOO much. I sense a redesign coming in the future, but I’m likely still going to incorporate the random movie quotes into the header (aren’t those sweet?).

I want some user interaction for my next design and I also want to know what content you prefer on the old bloggy blog.

First question: What should be the predominant color on my new blog design?

  1. Blue
  2. Red
  3. Green
  4. Black
  5. Other

Second question: Is there content that does not exist that you would like to see, or content that you would like to see more or less of?

Third question: Would you like to see me add a movie review sidebar? (I found a sweet plugin that will allow me to do really quick, on-the-fly movie reviews.)

So…it’s up to you…

Feedburner

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I’m testing something with my feed. Bear with me.

OK, so I’m going to try running my feeds through feedburner so I can get better metrics on how many people are signed up for my feed, etc. Anyway…I’m hoping that nothing changes for you in your feed readers…let me know if there are any problems.

The MySpace Experience

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I had a MySpace account for all of about 3 days. I signed up because my cousins in California had them, my brother has one, and they all said it was the hip thing to do. (Nevermind the whole stigma about it it being a haven for sexual predators…)

Anyway, I thought I would try it out, just to see what it was like.

I didn’t like it. I just felt like everything it offers, I already had (a place to share pictures – flickr, a place to share thoughts – this site). The only thing that I don’t have already is the whole “social” aspect of it. There are over 50 million users on MySpace, all linked through “friendships” and schools and groups and other connections.

What always bothered me about it was how ugly every site that I saw was. Not only that, but even ones that used these so-called MySpace templates STILL looked crappy. So I promptly deleted my account.
Today, Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine, put forth a MySpace effort that is clean, respectable and wicked worn.

For the first time, I reconsidered my decision to delete my MySpace page, download his CSS hack, tweak it up and go back, but ultimately, MySpace isn’t really my scene. I found 1 or 2 people on there that I wouldn’t have otherwise, but to be honest it wasn’t worth the effort.

Maybe after their new security advisor gets things into order, I’ll go back…but for now, I’m dedicated to this site (and topFIVEdesign, of course).

Longer Titles

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I’ve decided that my little experiment in shortening titles was a big pain. So I’m abandoning it.

Longer, more descriptive titles ahead.

P.S. I want to apologize for my site’s intermittent outage (as well as Jake’s site). My host, TextDrive, has been having MySQL outage issues with my server. So here’s the deal…I’m planning on switching hosts (AGAIN!) when our contract is up. I’m definitely going to rock Dreamhost…likely the best, most comprehensive hosting programs available.

Two Hundie

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“Baby, we’re gonna be up five HUNDIE by midnight!”

Trent, Swingers

Greatest movie about Vegas.

EVER.

OK, so there’s a lot to talk about. First, I want to congratulate myself on making it to 200 posts. This is my official 200th post (according to WordPress), so I’m going to do a little mental macarena for myself. 200 posts since October 1st of 2004. 200 posts in 529 days; that’s approximately 1 post every 2.645 days. Not too bad…but I’m going to try to get to 400 by the end of the year. Think I can do it?

Friday night, we tried to do some staging at my parents’ old house. It’s been for sale for quite a while now and we (and by we, I mean Alli’s mom…) tried to make it more appealing by putting some furniture in it. It looks A LOT better now.
Played this weekend in the Big G Volleyball tournament, a tournament that was hosted by my alma mater, Graceland University. It was disappointing. First, I was disappointed in the turnout of teams. Originally, they were expecting as many as 16. When we got the schedule last week, it was down to 11. When we showed up on Saturday, there were only 6. While I still had fun playing in the old gym, I was disappointed that more teams didn’t show up. Plus, we played HORRIBLY. I had to pass all day and I did decent for most of it, but then started passing really poorly and the problem was that it was more when it counted that I passed badly. I made up for it as much as I could with some good defense and my hitting was really pretty good for most of the day…I just chose to stop passing at the worst possible time. Plus, with only 6 teams, there was no rest built into the schedule. We were either playing or reffing the whole time. Not fun. By the time the tournament rolled around, we were all pretty beat. So we lost in the quarterfinals to a team we had beat easily in pool play.

Boo.

Best part about it though was that, since we were in Lamoni, we got to partake in the best pizza ever from Hampton’s Pizza Shack. I was able to keep some leftovers for lunch today and man, were they tasty!

Sunday, we got up and went to Bob Evans for some tasty breakfast and then basically slept the rest of the day away. I tried to watch the Big 12 Tournament Finals, but I couldn’t stay awake, only waking up to see that my Jayhawks had pulled it out in impressive fashion. I thought that their win over Texas could get them as high as a 3 seed, but I guess not. We’ll have to settle for a #4 in a pretty tough bracket. This year, I’m not going to let my homer attitude take the best of me and I’ll probably have KU losing to Pittsburgh and I’ll just be happy if they don’t, even if it does break up my bracket a little.

Finished off the weekend by watching Pride & Prejudice last night. It was an interesting flick, but we both couldn’t figure out why Keira Knightley was nominated for Best Actress. Gwyneth Paltrow or Claire Danes would have been much more deserving candidates in my opinion.

So that was it. Long, tiring weekend. Another on the docket for this weekend when we go to St. Louis to visit our friends there. Should be fun. Plus, the tournament starts. Good times.

Title

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So I’ve been considering making a minor change to my site, one that would make the headings bigger and force them to only be one word (very similar to the way Greg does titles at Airbag). Now, this would require me going back and changing every single one of my posts (which I’m OK with…there’s only about 190 of them).

I don’t know…I just thought it was a stylish way to title your posts. It’s not very Google-appreciative (but neither is the popularity of my site…according to Technorati, only about 5 people link here), but I just wanted to mix it up a little.

So what do you think? It’s either that or make all the titles full complete sentences.

Aside: Something that might be fun about the one-word title is that I could take submissions of words that would be titles from people who read my site and I could try to turn them into posts. It might be fun.

UPDATE: OK, I think I’m going to do this at least from here on out. My only problem is book reviews…I guess I’ll have to figure that one out.