No, I’m not burnt out from blogging. It’s the heat that’s doing it.

It’s actually been a slow day though, even in the blogosphere, which is fortunate because I was up until 3AM last night trying to work out some annoying kinks I had discovered on my blog. BTW, in case I didn’t say it enough before, IE is the suckiest suck butt piece of garbage browser Microsoft could have ever projectile vomited onto the masses. I cannot believe the things IE refuses to render correctly, and I can see why some web developers had given up on it and even installed scripts on their sites to block IE users from surfing in. Kinda funny actually. :lol:

And is it just me, or does YouTube’s native player seem to suck up an awful lot of CPU juice when embedding it onto your site?? I’ve personally noticed my CPU load had been skyrocketing into the 60-70% range whenever I’m playing a YouTube video. Yuck. Even more annoying, the embedded player is slightly bigger than an 800×600 resolution can handle, resulting in that accursed vertical scrolling bar showing up whenever I embed a video. @#$%!! Oh well…

Regardless, I think I have most of the blogging bugs squashed now, and hopefully when I install the Flickr plugin to bring my gallery online (either this weekend or next) that should be the end of it… for now.

Since starting this site, I’ve been surprised at the level of traffic I was able to generate through my recent roundup of blog postings, even getting as many as 20 visitors yesterday… only to see it plummet to absolute zero today, of course. Ack. I would like to be able to generate traffic on my own two feet without turning into a Trackback whore, but until I get ranked by Google that probably won’t happen for a while.

In the meantime I need to get back to prepping for law school. I’m trying to work up enough incentive to get myself back into the routine of studying again, but without any clear direction and assurance that the legal profession is really for me, I’m sometimes wondering if I should even bother. But, I’ll probably do it anyway, for the same reason people buy lottery tickets…. you never know.

And so it begins.

After 32 days of hair tearing, head banging, and extended bouts of rip roaring insanity, my blog is now officially online and ready to go. I still cannot fathom the reality that it took me well over a month before I could finally put the finishing touches on this new work of blogging art. It began with an idea that may or may not have been drug induced, and a subsequent hunt for the perfect blogware that would be given the esteemed honor of publishing my most intimate of thoughts online for all the world to see and revel in. It wasn’t long before I settled on Wordpress, and in spite of the absolute FITS it gave me, I don’t regret making that decision. It’s certainly not as polished as MovableType is, but it’s just as powerful, if not more so. The ability to write private and password protected posts, for example, are to this day features that are still missing from MovableType’s blogging solution. The plugin support is also amazing, even though it sucked up a good two weeks of my time before I finally finished scouring the Net for nifty and cool plugins to install and play with. By the time I was finished I had over 70 plugins installed, and the fact that they seem to be getting along with each other without blowing things up was a small miracle unto itself. The widget features were also way cool. It meant having the ability to move my sidebars around nilly willy, while adding all sorts of wild features without ever having to look at code (which I imagine is not the case with MovableType).

But now I understand why most people would just as soon rather open up an account with Blogger or Xanga and get straight to it than build a blog from scratch, even if that meant having far less control over its look and feel. Building a blog from the ground up while having only a rudimentary knowledge of PHP, XHTML standards and CSS styling was not an endeavor for the faint of heart to undertake, but I wasn’t scared. Stupid, maybe, but never scared.

I was however, reintroduced to wonderful things such as whitespace, XHTML validation, PHP syntax errors, and other frightening critical errors that so abruptly stopped my blog dead in its track that I thought the Rapture was about to occur. Then there was the very long fourth of July weekend where my PC box suffered from several viral infections, effectively taking it out of commission for days before I finally got everything working again.

For weeks, working on my blog became a daily ritual of adjusting some code, saving the file, uploading it to the server, then refreshing the blog in my browser to view the results. Adjust-Save-Upload-View-Repeat. Ad infinitum. There were some nights where I stayed up till 4 in the morning wrestling with some code until I either passed out or emerged victorious (usually the former). Some things just ended up being lost causes (such as getting skins to work right).

If that weren’t enough, I had to deal with the headache of making my blog look consistent across different browser platforms. I cannot tell you how many times I had things looking just fine and dandy in Firefox, only to see Microsoft’s Internet Explorer projectile vomit my blog all over the monitor screen. I’m forced to bastardize and invalidate my stylesheet with some ugly snippets of javascript all because IE to this day is still not standards compliant. Beautiful. Then there was the CSS standard itself, which makes it bloody near impossible to include a decent footer at the end of your blog. If this were a perfect world, my footer would be placed under all three columns here, not just the middle one. But because of either gross oversight or sheer stupidity (or both), this is virtually impossible to do without resorting to using floats (whatever the @#$% that is) or some other wacky means. On the plus side, the way my blog is set up now makes it far more search engine friendly than it was before, because the sidebars are absolutely (permanently) positioned on either side of the screen, which means search engines only need to crawl the header of the site before getting to the real meat of the blog. In other setups that don’t involve absolute positioning, search bots may have to sift through a crapload of code (involving the header AND the sidebars, and maybe even other superfluous data) before it finally reaches the main content of your site. I noticed a lot of blogs seemed to be set up like this too. Bad for them, good, however for me.

As if all this grief weren’t enough, my original hosting provider apparently had a fetish for rebooting their servers on a regular basis, which meant searching for a new hosting service, and then dealing with the agony of canceling my account, signing up for a new one elsewhere, moving all my files to the new server, etc., etc., etc.. Overall, the amount of work I was investing to getting this blog up and running was bordering on the absurd. For weeks I would stumble into the office at work in a daze after getting only 3 hours of sleep the night before, only to find myself logging into my work PC and getting right back to where I left off before I passed out. And why not? It’s not like my job was important or anything.

Eventually…finally… my work was at long last completed. So what happens now that the dust has settled, and I’m ready to move on with my life and start blogging for real?

I get writer’s block.

For the past month I had a million ideas and thoughts I wanted to put down on blogging “paper” and make known to the world (especially with what’s been happening in the Mideast), but when that moment finally arrives, I’m now drawing a complete blank.

Maybe I just need to get some sleep. Maybe I need a real life. Or maybe I just need to hurt somebody. Probably all three…