Well, it looks done. The new look for this and many other blogs I run is finally set. This blog, Abbey to Outlands, and the site for Dwight Wallbridge Productions all get new looks, with only the long dormant Canadian Geek Podcast site still waiting in the wings. All Things Azeroth is moved over, but the look will stay the same and only the back end should change too much. Enjoy the new looks and let me know what you think!
Recently in My Sites Category
Ok, let me see. The Geek's blog, as you can tell, is propagated as fully as I can discern. All Things Azeroth is ready to be moved over, quite possibly including posts and logins for the forums. DwightWallbridge.com is awaiting propagation, along with Cdngeekpod.com. Once all but geekblog.net is done, I will be contacting my host to inquire about closing out my account, with the remaining time being put toward the $1.50 I owed last month for bandwidth. I am happy to say that, barring any issues, I will not be running into such issues on this new host until I am much, much bigger a podcaster. I only hope that the RSS for the podcasts is quick in changing, and doesn't cause any major issues. I'll update you all soon.
Due to an over whelming amount of spam in comments and email on my old blog, geekblog dot net, I am now going to be blogging from this very location. Also, my World of Warcraft based podcast, Know Your Role, is being relaunched under a new name and with a new co-host. Look for new info here on that very, very soon.
I am overjoyed to say I can now access my website at my new host, fuitadnet.com. Therefore, with new space, I can get back to the website stuff. I plan to get caught up in the back posts, and also to keep you current on new posts. Hopefully work will cooperate on this, and give me time to at least jot down the outline of my thoughts, like I have been doing the last few days. Kind of hard to write down legibly on the bus. I have a couple of thoughts, and hopefully the availability of paper and a pen will also lead to more posts here as less info goes through my brain like a sieve. However, there was at least one issue with the move, in that my Gallery for DWP needed to be reinstalled, and as it's not the same as the one I had before, i have to upload all my photos again, and work out some issues. If you are very familiar with Gallery, do get a hold of me, as I would really appreciate the info and help.
So I was sitting there, talking to a friend, who was telling me of her webhost. Her host gives 5 GB of storage, and like 45 GB of bandwidth a month, all for less than $15 USD a month. I looked at my host, a good friend of a long time, who I have had issues on bandwidth and storage concerns with in recent months. I spent a number of nights thinking on this, as Jim is a good friend, who has given me many breaks. Alas, I decided that if I go and look for a few places to advertise here, I can afford to pay for new hosting, and to pay Jim off slowly, and made the very hard decision to move to a new host.
Jim's company is a good place for those who have smaller needs than I do(dozens of pictures @ 1 MB per pic easily gets up there in the storage) and what great personal service. They excel at that. I definitely recommend you check them out for hosting. I want to thank Jim and his support person Justin for the awesome support they gave me, and the willingness to help me out whenever they could. I only wish it could have lasted longer, that things could have turned out better.
As I wrote back 11 days ago, this blog is a direct result of September 11, 2001. This blog can be attributed to that day, Dave Whiner and Doc Searls, and my desire for a better, easier way to inform those who come to my sites for information, news, and my views. After 4 year and over 4000 posts, I find this site to be a great way for me to express myself, to meet new and interesting people, and keep in touch with friends I have made through this site. I want to thank you all for your patience, your loyalty, and your visits. You all make this site worth updating, and are what make me go back and catch up whenever I have time.
Some heavy duty testing of changing things here and there in the MT install found me the problem. When I first began installing MT on Mindstorm's server, it was told to me repeatedly that I did not need to set permissions on the folders I made in the install. On the current server, though, this does not appear to be the case, at least not when I am using php files. This, it seems, was the problem. After I started working with folder permissions, it wasn't long before I found the problem, the monthly folders. A quick addition to my 6A trouble ticket came back with the proper config option to set the folders right, and the warning I should delete the folder and rebuild to ensure the settings were correct. Unfortunately I had a slight oversight in that I forgot to change the 2.1 installs location to the Temp folder, and when I got hit by comment spammers over night, the 2.2 install got overwritten, and thus I had to delete and rebuild again. Now that that's been done, and I have done some extensive testing, I am happy to say it's all working perfectly, and smoothly. Geek Blog is back in business. Welcome.
Well, the only thing I have figured out at this point is that if I want you all to be able to comment and stuff, I need to go in and set the permissions manually for each individual archive page. For 3600+ posts, that is a lot of work. Therefore, I am going to temporary enable this on the last 3 months of posts, which is to say all the posts on the front page, and then will continue to work with Six Apart to figure out what needs to be done to get this permanently fixed. I know it's a permissions issue, as that's the problem with 90% of 500 Server errors, I just need to figure out what's needed, and what's being done currently. I hope you all like the look behind the new 3.2 default template. I will, of course, try to customize it over time and make it more Geek Blog, than Six Apart. In the meantime, I have a tonne of draft posts to catch up on, and these permissions problems to work out. I also need to get some pictures edited and posted on DWP, and am back to work, so I have less free time than I had before. Wish me luck.
Welcome. It's been a bit since I posted, but life has, as often happens in the blog world, gotten in the way. I have a fresh install of Movable Type 3.2, and thus a new look for it. I have had a lot of looks for this blog, and a lot of messages. The news these days talks about the Hurricanes, and the devastation in New Orleans. I have been more concerned, myself, with knees, my back, and other sundry parts of my body. My body is really rejecting this whole manual labour thing, but until another opportunity arises, I have no choice, especially staring down about $5000 in debt, not including my parents. Yeah, it's selfish, but I have a lot of problems of my own, without having to worry about others.
The people there will be getting money from several levels of government(finally). The world is sending money and help. The only thing I have is knees that scream in pain after a very short time and feet that beg often for me to stop hurting them. But, yeah, here's the new look. It's the default MT 3.2 template, and hopefully this will help me in the whole spam evasion deal, cause I am getting sick of having so many spam comments and trackbacks to remove. I had to spend a good 2 hours in the other MT install removing spam junk. I hope you like. I hope to post the draft stuff soon.
I know about the error messages, working on it. Sorry.
Ok, so since Jim has this shiny new dedicated server, and I am paying him out the ass(or should be) for hosting fees, I have decided to be, for once, money smart and combine all my hosted sites into one single hosting account, in an attempt to slow my increasing bill, and alleviate his strain. Therefore, the following sites will, eventually, move to this site: Geek Lens, Dwight Wallbridge Consulting(and a planned professional level photo section), and Pixels and Bits. I hope these will take very little time to get switched over, and will inf act interpret into a few things changing. First, I hope that the photo site changes will lead to more interesting and frequent postings, with interactivity with you all. Also, I hope to finally do something with a few of these sites. Stay tunes for the updates.
Ok, so it's not huge changes, but changes none the less. I am moving slowly to edit the default MT template to be more personalized. Jim recommended when I signed on with him that I go with the default, and while I will stay with the general look, I do plan to move things around just a little. I have updated all my links outside of my sites, and deleted a whole lot. I hadn't realized how many people were getting links from me without my actually getting any back. :P to them. I have changed the color, and plan to set forth to create a new logo as soon as I have an idea of what I might want. I plan to make Geek Blog 2.0 look as amazing as I can, and as original as I can, of course within the confines of the tool I use, though I plan to make more changes as time goes.
For those with older links to posts here, I would advise using the search feature on the side to look for it's new location. If it does not exist, it is likely in the 11 months I am in the midst of rebuilding. this is taking longer than I had originally thought it would, but I still plan to work on it on an ongoing basis. I am up to mid February 2004 at this time. Between making the posts ready for import and copying over the comments that all my kind readers have submitted over time, it is taking a lot longer than I would have thought. On the upside, it is a good lesson, and I am being a good geek and backing up off the server nightly, and off my HD every 3 or 4 days. On that, enjoy the changes, and I hope you come back for more.
Hi. I notice that a few comments I have made around the net have garnered a few click throughs to this little place of mine. Specifically, a new plan I have to open a select number of blogs at least once a day and actually read their postings is going well, and comments made on blogs like Jay Allen's(hope SXSW was fun) and Wil Wheaton's(congrats on CSI, it was fun seeing you on TV again) blogs have earned me a few visitors, so hello I also want to thank all of you who have stuck around, reading this blog even when I don't post for a few days, even through the times when I was posting far less. A lot of you may not understand this, that I cherish a few you even with thousands of visitors a month, but few of you comment, few of you take even a remote interest v in comments of what goes on. Thanks to those who do, and *points to Comment link* please feel free to do so if you don't.
I have decided to expand the ad deal I am offering by 2 weeks, from the 15th of March to the end of March. This is due to the change in some dates in some events that the funds were to be used for, and gives potential advertisers a little longer to make their decisions on how much and where to spend their money(assuming there are some out there considering such things). I have spoken to a few past and present advertisers, and there are 1 or 2 strong possibilities, but I would still like all of you reading this to keep it in mind if you hear of any associates, family, or friends looking to advertise a business or site. The site has had 70,000+ visitors since January 13th, 2005 when the site was moved to it's current host, so it has a lot of potential. Email me, or pass on my email, geek at this site.
Just a quick note, for those not using aggregator. Please scroll down to about the 6th, as I posted 6 new, back dated posts, all of them I think fairly good pieces for reading. Included topics are the Blog giants, GoDaddy scammers, RSS and TechTV I mean G4TechTV I mean G4. Enjoy!
I am offering a limited time deal, out of admitted desperation. I am in need of money for some stuff in the next month and a bit, and to cover my own needs, and therefore I am offering this to most sites. I still have limitations on what ads I'll accept, I am willing to consider any submitted ad. The offer is this. 1 text ad here for 2 years for $300 USD. 1 text ad both here and on geeklens.com, 2 years, $400 USD. The only limit on the ad is to keep the length in reason. The latter is a savings of over $300 off my usual rates. This ad offer is open until either $1,200 is reached, or the middle of March. That's 3-4 add buys. Email me now to discuss arrangements, and I will keep you all up to date as the offers roll in.
Ok, we're doing pretty good so far. We have all up to the end of January 2004 back in, with the rest accessible in archives around the net. For this, I want to send my thanks, though it is unlikely the sources will ever notice. Google, Wayback Machine, Bloglines, and Yahoo. Wayback brought me to the end of January 2004, Google for February(though I found out later I already have local archives of files up to mid April), Yahoo from beginning of April to the end of July, and Bloglines for the rest of the way. There is a shit load of work ahead of me, but even more would have been necessary without these sources, if I could have found the data at all. Lastly, we now have Typekey working again, so you can all go back to that form of comments.
Ok, so as you might have noticed, the site is slowly getting up to date. I was planning to bring back the old layout but my buddy Jim advised it might be better to just use the default and tweak it a little. Also, after considerable searching of CD after backup CD, I found archives that went form the beginning of Geek Blog, just 11 days after September 11, 2001, until roughly 1 year ago. I then proceeded to get the comments that had arrived since into the one post that has been the most popular, about 2 years ago and me talking about caffeine withdrawal. I have now imported those files, and will begin to slowly bring the rest of 2004 forward to you all. I am not fooled into thinking this will be some simple task, because it won't. Wish me luck.
As I have not heard from Blogomania about my offer, I assume it is revoked. I have looked over the Wayback Machine, and note that it is missing about a year, thus my ads aren't saved. The good thing is that Bloglines has about a year worth of archives, so I am good in that respect. I should, I think, be able to grab almost all of my blog posts, and at least some of my comments. I am not sure if this will include the marathon post on the topic of caffeine addiction and withdrawal that was, by far, the most popular post I ever made. I suppose at the least I have emails to replace comments if it comes down to that. Sadly, while I will endeavor to get the archives back as quickly as possible, it is unlikely they will be back in the near term.
I just wanted to thank Jim, a long time friend over at Mindstorm Hosting, who has time and again shown himself to be a great friend. Once again he was kind enough to pull my ass out of the fire and host me when the account at Blogomania was suspended. He has allowed me to keep my agreement with my advertisers, and work out a pay schedule. If it weren't for Jim, you'd all be staring at a 'Account Suspended' page in front of you, and I'd be pulling my hair out imagining the money it was costing me. Now, if you don't mind, I have over 500 emails to peruse and sort because I was stupid and didn't set up my mail clients right once the move was made.
As you know, I found my site through Blogomania suspended a few days ago. While I am working to bring back the old data, there is much I am missing. I have advertisers expecting to see their ads displayed, all of which I need to recreate from emails unless other methods can be found. I have a favor to ask of you all in that line. In order to get to my data, I need to begin making payments to Blogomania. The first payment will necessarily be a large one, with smaller recurring payments thereafter. I can handle the recurring payments, but it is the up front payment I need help with. Below you will find a PayPal Donate button. If you can spare, though I know there are many causes ahead of me and it is less than a month after Christmas, please donate what you can spare.
As I said, I know there are other causes, such as the victims of the South Asia Tsunami, who have no homes, and very little to live off of but our generosity. In this regard I am planning a few things. Anything above and beyond what is required for the cause I addressed above will go to Tsunami relief. As well, I plan to donate half of all profits I make off my Cafe Press store from Monday on. Items will have adjusted prices, with some prices going up, some down, and some remaining the same. I will endeavor to make the prices on items fair as can be. As for ads, I will also donate half of all proceeds, after hosting is taken out, to Tsunami relief as well, so if you are interested in donating to both causes, advertising here would be excellent form. Thank you for your time.
As you may, or may not, have noticed, the Geek blog site hosted through Blogomania has died. This is through no fault of theirs, only my own. I want to thank the staff over there for their patience and their understanding. Sadly, while I was not canceled, only suspended, I do need to put ads up so those who paid me money get their money worth, and hopefully those same people will continue to advertise with me, even possibly expanding it. For now, I have to head to work soon, but I will be trying my damnedest to get this as close to the old template as I can, unless I somehow decide to change it all up since I am from scratch anyway. Thanks for your patience everyone, I'll be back ASAP with whatever I can scrounge from archives and such.
Well, it is looking good. I have not yet heard of any issues with the site, about 24 hours after it was all done. The site it good, and the only thing is those who are linking by html file, instead of root or such. I have, though, set up a new set of error pages, so if you see one please do follow the instructions and inform me of where. If you get here by a link and get an error, please do let the site know. Overall I hope this will make the site work better, and allow for better load times. Now, if you don't mind, I have some posts to catch up on.
Ok, well, this is looking good so far. I have just completed the import, and everything looks to have worked on my blog. I am not sure if every little bit has worked perfectly, but I will do the second to last rebuild then move it over to the prime directory(aka http://www.geekblog.net/) and then do the final rebuild there, and deleting the html files that are there. This seems, I hate to tempt the fates and all, that it has been too easy, things have gone too well. Anyone else think the same? Yeah, thought so. Well, I best get the main blog moved over, then move on to Lens.
A conversation at work yesterday has led me to create a new Café Press store. The artwork is rough, not very polished at all, but the title says a lot. Anti SCO store is a place to get a new line of merchandise, from t-shirts to boxers, mouse pads to coffee mugs. The current theme is FSCK SCO, and the wearer is given the chance to pronounce their support of the GPL licensed Linux Operating System. If anyone else has thoughts on how one can easily, on a shirt, denounce the SCO lawsuits, please so let me know. I know a few readers are avid SCO haters, and Linux fans, so I have no doubt some will find this line of merchandise fun. I am keeping the profit off these very low, and while it may not be as low cost as others, it is a worthwhile cause to promote.
Ok, so a few friends doing mods, and my new year mod plans have led me to have modding on the brain, as my ever broadening wishlist will soon attest, and thus I have desired to have a less hectic and more localized area to discuss modding. As I do when such things occur, I thought of creating a mail list. Is there any readers who would be interested? Or would this be better left to the Forums, whenever they work right? I am eager to hear modding tales, tips, and warnings. I also want to see what you all have done to beautify your beige boxes, to make them worthy of us Geeks. Please do comment here, and I will definitely work something out for us all to have somewhere that is not hostile or crowded to talk shop and swap ideas and reviews.
