I finally uploaded several sets of photos I took during a vacation in 2005, and a group of photos from Manhattan when I was playing tour guide for a relative of mine.  It looks like my hard work finally paid off:  I wanted a personal gallery in-house to keep my photos rather than a relying exclusively on a third party service like Flickr, but now I can have the best of both worlds.  I installed a module that allows me to export my in-house photos to Flickr while still retaining its descriptions and tags, which makes photo uploads and synchronization so much easier now.  I really need to start using my cameras again, and with this headache out of the way, you should finally start seeing more photo uploads on a semi- regular basis now.  Do I not rock? 

One thing I need to get off my chest:  Gallery2 is the crappiest crapola craptastic crappy dappy pile of chewy mooseballs I’ve ever seen pass off as a photo management system.  Ok, I’m being a little harsh here, but really, when it comes to offering features likes ratings, comments and so on, it is a thing of hell.  Captcha wouldn’t work, I couldn’t get email notifications of comments, the ratings systems was primitive and pointless, and the slideshow is so basic I suspect it’s still using the same code from 1997.

Still, it’s the only gallery that I could successfully embed into WordPress using this theme, so I’m pretty much stuck with it for now.  It’s one saving grace was being able to export my photos to Flickr, so if you want to comment or fave my photos you can do it there easily enough.

One extra thing about Flickr: my photos get MUCH better exposure there.  So much that a map guide requested my photo of the Lincoln Memorial for use in their Washington edition.  They didn’t pay me a dime though, but still, it’s nice to have a little recognition.  You can see it here.

And before I forget, I also added a link in my sidebar where you can easily chat with me in real time (if I’m around.)  You can find the link in “My Current Status” right above my Twitter widget.  Tres awesomeness, dude. 

Now without further ado, my new photo sets!

Enjoy!

Got accepted into the humor category of alltop.com, an up and coming aggregator that allows you to screen through a mass of metadata of some of the most popular sites around the web.  Don’t know how much traffic it’ll be able to bring in, but couldn’t hurt to have them add my feed.  Love their badges though:

Heh. 

Just received a PayPal payment from one of my ad networks:

ONE PENNY?

Here it is, a nice compromise between having a dark theme and accommodating those of you who simply MUST have a boring white layout with boring black text, because you’re color blind or have the eyes of a 90 year old or just like to bust my chops because you’re a petty vain creature who needs to seriously sit on something spiky and leave me the flip alone already.  Mother.

You have no idea what kind of work it took to go into the theme and hack some serious gibberish “What Drunk Monkey Came Up With THIS Crap?!?!” that we all know and love as PHP and CSS, just so I could make you guys happy.  I didn’t go all whitey though because it seemed too bright to me, so I toned it down a bit and modified the line height for the easiest readability.  Please tell me this looks alright to you or I’m just gonna have to go out and start kicking in the faces of those asstastic illegals who sit on the corner waiting for work and ruining the look of the neighborhood just by being ugly.

Come to think of it I’d be doing that anyway even if I was in a good mood. 

But seriously, let me know what you think.  I also finished embedding the Gallery script into my blog here, so I can now upload albums of photos and even video/audio content as well.  Super cool.  I love to keep everything in house instead of seeing my junk being exclusively shipped out to content stealers like Flickr and YouTube, so being able to get this working was a godsend.  You know how the US Army uses the slogan “Army of One?”   Well consider me the Social Media Network of One.  Why?  Because I am just too awesome to participate in third world networks like MySpace and Facebook. 

I think that pretty much wraps it up as far as the upgrade goes.  I may play around with AJAX a little to see if I can enhance some features here, but it already seems like overkill to me.  Plus I really need to go out and get some sun after having been up my blog’s rear end for over a week now. 

BOOYAH!

It’s time to not only celebrate my blog relaunch, but my two year blogging anniversary!!    And dude, the video totally captures the moment here.  I’m talking a blog wrecked to death, only to come back stronger, sleeker, and totally badass with some badass music cranking in the background and leather jackets and cool black vintage cars cruising the highway and let us go have a throwdown and kick some serious scum of the earth hellbags because baby,  I am back!

Yeah, I’m a little excited here. 

But really, what I just pulled off was a miracle that only God could have given me, and I now have the latest version of WordPress along with a new Who-is-your-DADDY theme that is all kinds of awesomeness. 

I still need to work out a few kinks and decide on a new photo gallery to use, but for all intents and purposes the site is now live, with a sleeker, faster look and a few new bells and whistles I think you’ll all enjoy.   For an idea of what’s new, see the little oval thingie jiggy to the right of each post title?  Go give that a click.

Cool, huh? 

In addition, you’ll now be able to edit comments as well.  I also dropped a few plugins, added a cache system and went with a 2 sidebar look again to reduce clutter.  Yes the ads are still there, but they are no longer as obtrusive as they used to be.  To be honest I got tired of having a larded up ad block embedded inside my posts, partly because I couldn’t quote or post any media content on the fly.  The ad would jam it up and I’d have to manually remove it in order for the post to show cleanly.  Not cool.  But I still need the ads though, since the 50 cents I’m making a day is paying for my newspaper, and I just don’t know how I could live without those two quarters a day, ya know?

As for the dark theme, I’m working on creating a white backdrop just for the posts and comments for easier reading (while still maintaining a dark look), so stay tuned there.  I might have gotten it done sooner but the theme kept overriding my color settings.  Regardless, let me know what you think.

It wasn’t easy though, but I got through it, and now I can finally enjoy the fruits of my labor…. except of course, Google just had to rain on my parade by dropping my pagerank from a 4 to a 3 while I was busy upgrading.    Really Google, why don’t you just suck my ass times a thousand?  Dweebs.

But meh, whatever.  I finally made a leapfrog in upgrading without having to spend a fortune to have a designer do it, my sleek black car will get a nice facelift and wax job by the end of the summer, and in a few more months I’ll be out of debt,  cruising the road and enjoying my new lease on life.  All I’ll need then is a weathered black leather jacket, and my life will truly be complete. 

“Let me just update this one file here….”

Sigh.

I had to go update a plugin last night because of a security hole, but unfortunately that update caused another plugin to break, so I had to go upgrade that plugin as well, which of course caused yet another plugin to break, so I went to upgrade that too, and before I knew it my spam blocker goes down in flames, I can’t preview comments anymore, my images no longer show up, my sidebars suddenly disappears, and then finally my entire blog goes up in smoke, the only thing left in its place being some cryptic error message telling me what an idiot I am and hahaha I suck.

Mother*&^% technology.

Things seem to be ok now, but my goodness, I was up till 4AM last night and had to work through the better part of today before things finally calmed down.

You know what, I think it’s time I gear up for a major revamp. I was gonna just say screw it and have a professional designer do it, but I think it’ll probably be better to set up a test blog closed from the public so I can play around with the latest blogging toys without tearing my hair out and spitting at people, and then when it’s stable enough I can release it for prime time with little fuss. That should also keep me busy enough so I don’t waste my time pining for a girl to love me since that’s never gonna happen because women all suck the ass of a hairy moose and should die in some horrible nuclear explosion bunch of monkey-faced harlot whores they be.

*ahem* Except my beloved womenly readers of course, who are all the very essence of perfection, virtue, and beauty.

See how I suck up to you guys so you’ll continue to love me and read my blog despite my crazy wild women-hating rants? I am so awesome.