Ok… am I the ONLY one who gets more than a little frustrated when trying to use MyBlogLog? I understand the idea behind it, but it gets tedious clicking on a reader’s avatar, then having to click not once, but twice just to see that user’s blog, and so on. It’s just a lot of click, click, clicking every dang fricking way, and I have to hope the reader I originally clicked on posted some helpful info about who he or she is and what kind of blog he or she runs, otherwise, I’ll have no clue who or what just visited my site. It doesn’t help that the pages of user profiles and their respective blogging communities look exactly alike, making it disorienting to navigate (hmm, was I here already? I can’t tell…) Up until recently MyBlogLog didn’t even have a tags system, making the act of trying to find like minded readers and bloggers with similar interests by using the search query alone a frustrating endeavor as well. When you’re viewing a blogging community there’s a list of readers, but all you see is the username and avatar. Not very informative or helpful, especially when there’s a TON of readers. Usually I just end up clicking on avatars that depict a cute looking girl (yeah I know I’m pathetic, bite me already).

Oh well, maybe I’ll get the hang of it eventually, especially if the tagging system matures enough to make finding like-minded readers a bit more easier.

I’ve been troubleshooting my blog to see what’s been causing the added load time, and then ended up spending a couple of bucks so I could correctly send pics to my blog from my cell phone, which previously kept resulting in broken links and improper syntax. I think finally got it right though….

By the way, blogging by cell has been made possible using a 2 year old plugin script…. written in German. Good grief, half the time I wonder what in the blue balls I’m doing here. It seems I spend more time doing blog maintenance than actually blogging. Still, I did manage to build this thing from scratch after months of work and scouring all four corners of the Internet for nifty plugins, so I’m not about to abandon this little project of mine and flee to Xanga just yet.

Anyhoo, after getting sidetracked by the moblogging issue, I went back to analyze why my index page seemed to lag at times when I tred to load it. Apparently, my tags plugin (the Ultimate Tag Warrior) seems to be the culprit. I noticed the load time sometimes jumped to 30 seconds or longer when my browser tried to access the ultimate-tag-warrior-ajax.php file. I have no idea why this is the case, but naturally I thought upgrading it might fix the issue.

Nope. Upgrading only proceeded to break the Tags Cloud shown in my sidebar. One step forward, two steps back. Love it…

I think the simpler solution was to just remove the code for the tags altogether from my index page. It clutters things up anyway, and it’s probably more appropriate to just display them on my individual pages instead. I think I finally licked this problem, but I’ll have to check it from home to make sure.

Ugh, I need a life.

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…