I’ve been trying to figure out how I could work side posts (mini-posts or the equivalent of tweets on Twitter) and a featured articles gallery onto my blog, that way it would be easier for new visitors to dive right into my content and get a good feel for what my site’s about.  Normally what people do is build a front page that highlights the best content and then push the blog itself to a subdirectory.  But then again I’m not normal. 

So check it out:  the featured articles can be seen on my home page and the side posts can be seen on the top right.  You know, where there’s a big honking image that says “SIDE POST?” 

And lookie here, I’ve even included a poll so you can tell me what y’all think of the minor changes! 

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Tags: articles, blog, gallery, plugins, posts, tweaks, twitter, visitors
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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   Whoa, I’m all woozy after finally pulling my head out the gaping buttinkos of my finicky and power hungry blog.   I just spent the last 3 days hunting down every bug and problem that popped up during my migration to a new VPS hosting service, and it seemed like wave after wave of issues would keep coming at me.  First my photo gallery wouldn’t work, then it worked but wouldn’t let me log in.  Then I try to upload files at the same exact moment that my cable modem decided to act like a dialup modem.  Then my plugins would bomb out, then I’d get connection timeouts, then I’d suddenly get a brownout at my apartment that shuts down my computer and erases all the troubleshooting I’ve been doing.  The whole weekend was just a blur of logging into the server, logging on to my blog, logging in here and logging in there, enabling this, disabling that, then enabling this and that only to find that it disabled something else that I really needed, so I have to go back and disable them again so it reenables a setting I needed more, and then I need to test it all by deleting my browser cache, flushing my cookies and refreshing the page, then refreshing it again.  And again.

Can I DIE now??? 

Lord am I glad that’s over.  I hope.  I’m gonna go take a nice hot shower now, and after that I’m going full on hobo with pizza, Cape Cod chips and Coke Zero.  If anyone needs me I’ll be in my captain’s chair watching the latest DVDs from Netflix. 

Tags: blog, bug, hosting service, issues, migration, plugins, server, troubleshoot, troubleshooting, VPS
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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So how is 2009 working out for me so far you ask?  Well aside from the knifing sensation I’ve been feeling on my left face that had me screaming at the top of my lungs like a 6 year old girl in sheer agony for the past few days, 2009 is going just swimmingly. 

Right before New Year’s Eve I started feeling a dull ache near my left ear, which eventually turned into a full blown horror show of aches and pains that reduced me to a whimpering ball of misery.  I was in the bathroom when 2008 turned to 2009, (you could say I literally crapped for a year), then came out and cried for a while in my bed with a heat pad on my face until sleep mercifully brought me some relief.  Once again there would be no midnight kisses for this little wussy boy.  I hadn’t been able to eat for the past two days either.

It seems fitting that 2008 would go out like this, since it had been the year that saw me crippled with a garden variety of health problems that made me utterly miserable, and I’m only beginning to come out of the woods now.  My jaw ache (which I think was due to TMJ syndrome) finally began to dissipate yesterday, and even though I was in severe pain before, I still managed to clear a month’s load of work at my job so I could get a fresh start for the new year.  I left early on Friday and was able to recuperate for the rest of the weekend.

I even found time to add a new feature here called “Asides.”    There were many occasions when I wanted to express a thought or two on my blog, but it didn’t justify taking up an entire post for since these thoughts were never more than a sentence or two long.  Usually I reserve this kind of “micro-blogging” for Twitter instead, but I was never comfortable seeing all my brilliant one-liners disappear into the Twitterverse without a record of it being on my blog.

So… with a little bit of tweaking and the help of a few plugins, now every tweet I make will also be posted to my blog in a vanilla “Aside” format.  I’m even able to exclude them from my newsfeed so it doesn’t get inappropriately mixed in with my normal blog posts as well.  Am I awesome or what? 

This setup should be really good for filling the gap between blog posts, as well as please loyal readers who don’t use Twitter.

Now if you’ll excuse me, since I never had my midnight kiss, I’m treating myself to a glass of choco milk and a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses. 

Tags: agony, bathroom, health, health problems, midnight kiss, new year, newsfeed, plugins, TMJ syndrome, twitter
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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“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.

Tags: blog, plugins, revamp, security hole, update, upgrade, women suck, wordpress
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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I just spent the last few days squashing some of the remaining bugs on my site, and I’m telling ya, these were cyber cockroaches from hell. I stomp one bug, and another one shows up, stomp that one, then another shows up.

It’s the kind of thing that could suck up whole days of my life if I’m not careful. I see a problem and I think “ohh, let me just tweak this one lil’ thing, shouldn’t take more than a few seconds…” Next thing I know it’s Wednesday, and I had started tweaking that lil’ thing on Sunday. Whether it’s some coding error with a plugin, a flickering bug in IE6, or the layout being a few pixels off in browsers like Safari, I was just resolved to fix every remaining issue on my site so I could finally put it behind me and delve into my real passion, which had always been writing (blogging).

As for web design and all that that entails, it was a good learning experience but man, I have just about had enough of this crap. Next time I want my blog redesigned, I’m hiring a super web guru from Silicon Valley to do it for me. I of course expect to be making some money off my blog by that time, so I should be able to afford it when the time comes.

I hope.

Tags: blink, blog, blogging, browsers, bugs, cockroaches, code, crap, errors, few days, hell, IE6, learning, money, passion, pixels, plugins, rendering, safari, silicon valley, tongue, tweaking, web design
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Using the awesome and very promising OIOPublisher Direct plugin, I can now sell ads and other services directly to potential advertisers without the need for a middle-man, which means I’ll keep 100 percent of the profits I make. WOOOOO!!! I’m gonna be rich! Filthy, stinking, disgustingly rich out of my greedy butt, depraved mind! BOOYAH!!!!

Well maybe.

It’ll be interesting to see how I fare with this, but at the very least I’ll finally have total control over what gets placed on this blog. There’s a lot of bad hojos and jojos out there looking to bam-bam your jam-jams with their scam-scams, and advertising networks like Google’s Adsense have done very little to stop them. With this solution I’m hoping the quality of the ads and goods that get served here will be far better than what most readers and visitors usually see elsewhere, and will help to complement this site rather than detract from it.

Well, I can dream anyway.

If you’re interested, I’m offering rock bottom prices right now since my traffic and readership is um, *ahem*, not quite where I’d like them to be right now. You can choose from link ads to paid posting to video ads, and more.

Click here for details, and if you’re interested in installing OIOPublisher on your own blog, let me know and I’ll give you some pointers. Initially it was designed for WordPress 2.1 or better due to its native cron support, but after working with the developer for a few days, he was able to come up with a solution to run cron jobs on Wordpress 2.0.X blogs by using the WP-Cron plugin. Muy coolio.

Tags: ads, advertisers, advertising, bam bam, coolio, cron jobs, few days, google, jojos, link ads, middle man, middlemen, OIOPublisher, paid posts, plugins, pointers, scam, video ads, wordpress, wp
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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