Life of Brian

For the longest time I keep wondering why I can’t just sit down every day and write a simple post to my blog. I spend money every year to keep this thing running, but how can I justify the cost if I never use it?

It’s weird because I love to write. I have a minor in creative writing for Pete’s sake. I think it’s just because I don’t have an audience. Not that I need one, but it helps to know that my words and thoughts are being read. I like to know that my thoughts mean something to someone other than myself.

However, there’s also the argument of why do I need an audience to write stuff on my blog? Why do you care who reads your posts? Because it’s human nature to be influential. If we’re not here for some greater purpose then why are we here? I feel that I was born to make people think. I’ve tried and failed several times but when I succeeded I felt accomplished.

Readers keep me motivated. I’ve always wanted to be an author, (and to some extent I am), but why does it matter if no one reads it? That’s the question.

I know I’ve said this many many times in the past but, from this day forward I plan on writing at least 3 posts a week. I need to beef up this scrawny little blog and keep things interesting, if for no other reason than for myself.

I’ve actually been contemplating a book posted on the net, like an interactive story that can have a following and ultimately be shaped by the reader’s comments and suggestions. Perhaps I’ll use Facebook and my own personal weblog to amass a following of readers who can, through collaboration, create a unique story. I’m all about a large group of people coming together to accomplish a common goal.

We’ll see how that goes and as always I’ll keep you posted.

Brian

Interestingly my laptop that’s running Ubuntu opens and loads images faster than my main machine running Windows. I’m using the same browser and my laptop is nowhere near as fast as my desktop.

Just found that interesting.

Over the weekend I did some heavy website updates.

I unvieled my new side navigation with expandable links. I also did some testing with what I’ve coined The Five: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari. (I consider those to be the five most popular browsers available at this time. They are in no particular order besides alphabetical.)

Early on I had issues with IE not displaying my links correctly. My quick fix was to just have 2 versions of the site; one for IE and one for every other browser. It seems to be working, so I’m pleased.

There are several more updates to be made to the site, one being content content content I’m currently missing 9 potential pages of content. That’s quite a lot. The other thing, (which you can argue is the same as the first), is my picture gallery. I’m using an open source gallery appropriately named Gallery and the load times on the images are slow. I’m not sure if it is the size of the images, my hosting plan’s bandwidth or Gallery itself, but I decided to do it all by hand for now. I will admit this process is time consuming, but the images load faster. I end up sacrificing features for usability, at least until I can do more testing on the newer version on Gallery.

If I can do those couple of things then I think I can have a pretty polished website.

As always drop me a line at brian@coldmizer.net and keep checking back from time to time for more new stuff

B

I need to make something very plain before everyone starts calling me a copy-cat.  A few posts back I made mention of another WoW blog called Adventures of a Dwarf Priest.  In that post I said that he and I were using the same WordPress template for our blog.  Please believe me when I say that this is purely by coincidence.  I had absolutely no intentions of copying Laneer’s site design and layout.  This just happened.  Like I said in the previous post I was happy to see that someone else was actually using the same theme I was because well that means I’m not the only one and it means someone else obviously found that this theme is worth using.

The way I setup my site is pretty much the way the theme works and it just seemed like the right thing to do.  I had used the Armory widget before I had seen it on Laneer’s site and like I said before I got rid of it because it wasn’t displaying a piece of gear correctly.

Just wanted to let everyone know that, Yes I’m using the same template/layout that Laneer is using, but No, I did not do this on purpose.

Now, back to my regular posts, (that is until I get called out for real ).

Been doing some research since I last posted on getting some new features on the blog.

First thing I did was read about how to get those cool item tooltips from Wowhead to show up on my site.  After a couple minutes of searching the Wowhead site I found what I was looking for.  See for yourself.

Swine Flu
Thori’dal, The Stars’ Fury
Mechano-hog

It was just a simple piece of java code that I copied and pasted into the appropriate .php file.  Very easy to do.

Another thing I did was reload a WordPress widget that I had running as a test a while back.  I got rid of it because it didn’t display correctly but now it seems to be working just fine

It’s basically a cool little app that displays my character info off to the side.  It shows my talent specs, my gear, my professions and it also shows my current achievements.  It’s a must have widget for any aspiring World of Warcraft blogger to have.

The other things I’ve been doing is reading through lines of markup to arrange certain things and get rid of a few others.  Basically I’ve just been doing simple maintenance to the site.

Now I’m working on getting a nice snazzy image widget to display image galleries or whatever I want to display on the site.  I wanted to use Flickr but it’s owned by Yahoo! and I’m not a big Yahoo! fan.  Personally I’d like to use Picasa since it’s a nice simple Google app but I need to find a compatible WordPress widget first.