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.

Well maybe.

It all depends on how the upgrades go tomorrow. My hosting provider (Hostgator) is upgrading all their servers to PHP5 and MySQL5, meaning one of two things could happen: either I’m fretting over nothing and the upgrades will go smoothly, leaving my precious blog relatively unscathed. Or…

There’s no telling how all the components of my site is going to react, but needless to say I’m a little nervous. I’ve backed up all my files, but if some major part of my blog is not compatible with the new server, then I am totally up poo-poo creek without a paddle.

Honestly, I just don’t have the strength or patience anymore to deal with a major meltdown. I’ve exhausted all my energy trying to keep my blog running as smoothly as possible, and if it all goes to crap because of this upgrade, that might just be the end of this site as we know it.

So, should the worst happen, I bid you all farewell. Goodbye, you cruel, cruel Internet! You’ve taken a once young promising lad and reduced him to a shriveled up ball of insanity, bitterness and despair. Damn you!!!! Damn you all to the fiery flames of LOLcats hell!

“We’re getting new computers!” Mick rubbed his hands together, barely able to contain his boyish glee.

“It’s about fricking time,” I said. We had been due for a major revamp of our network for the longest time now. In fact we were still using terminals that were older than me for our work here. The new network though promised to bring us brand spankin’ new computers, consolidate all our antiquated databases, and eliminate at least half of our workload. It was the kind of thing we could have only dreamt about, but it looked like it was finally going to become reality.

Several tech guys showed up with cables, and one of them discussed the new setup with Mick.

“Yeah we’re gonna replace these two terminals here, should happen in a couple of weeks or so.”

“Don’t forget we need an extra computer too. We have five guys here and four computers. That’s just not gonna work.”

The tech guy just ignored me and continued chatting with Mick. I seem to be getting a lot of that lately. Am I dead or something?

The tech guys started removing shingles to wire some cables through in preparation for our upgrade. One of them removed a shingle over the desk behind me….

And a flood of mouse droppings came pouring down.

“Sh–!!!”

It was everywhere. On our fax machine, the computer, court papers, the keyboard… just… everywhere.

We had a problem with this before, and basically nothing had been done about it. But now we were approaching critical mass. I mean seriously, does someone need to drop dead from mice poisoning here before people start to give a flying leap?

What truly depressed me though was the look on my coworkers’ faces. This look of defeatism, the sad reality that nothing they said would ever make a difference. They just stood there, shrugging their shoulders while the sky rained its pellet sized crap on us. Their tired eyes revealed virtually no will to fight.

Screw that. These bastards are gonna get a war from me. Let the poo fly, cuz it… is… ON.

After years of computer use, you’d think I would have learned by now that it’s not always wise to upgrade to the latest and greatest software the minute it comes out. It’s just bad hoodoo, dude.

But of course the second Wordpress 2.1 had been released, I just HAD to download it and install it right away, thinking my blog would run twice as fast due to the much touted bugfixes and cleaner code 2.1 offered. I imagined angels singing and the sounds of songbirds chirping as visitors would come and gape in awe at the newfound speed and ease at which they would surf my newly upgraded website.

Nope. Instead, it broke a few of my plugins and then torpedoed my blog’s skin. I furiously deleted everything and uploaded my backup copy as soon as I could, then sat back with a tear in my eye as other bloggers happily went onto 2.1 nirvana.

But I noticed in the brief moment that I did manage to get 2.1 working, that my first reaction had been: “Gee, doesn’t seem to be any different from 2.0.” And now, right on the heels of 2.1’s release, the developers are planning to soon release 2.2. After looking at the features THAT release will offer, I realized it didn’t really offer anything that I didn’t already have with the plugins I was currently using now. So truthfully, other than updating Wordpress 2.0.X with security fixes, there really wasn’t a pressing need for me to upgrade. I also knew with each upgrade it would take days, weeks, months (and maybe never) for developers to update their plugins in order to ensure compatibility with the latest version of Wordpress.

So what’s the hurry really? My blog is working fine as it is, and besides it seems like every time I upgrade, some major component gets totally hosed, forcing me to downgrade once again. If it ain’t broke…

I’m sure eventually I’ll have to upgrade my blog some day, especially once the developers stop supporting security fixes for my now grandfathered version of Wordpress. But until that happens, I ain’t gonna do nuttin’. Nuttin’, you hear me? Nuttin’!!!

Instead, I cleaned up the backend by removing some useless or rarely used plugins, then installed and somehow managed to get WP-Cache working without a hitch. That should cache my main pages and hopefully speed up load time for visitors. Aren’t I thoughtful? My blog now seems to be running smoothly, all my plugins are functional, and I’m finally starting to enjoy blogging for real again. Life is good.

Now, if I could only get me a woman…