Site Related

Tales From Behind The Blog

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My search for the perfect template marches forward. I spent most of today venturing through WordPress.org and the four corners of the internet to find a template that doesn’t completely piss me off. When searching I get bombarded with e-commerce, portfolio, business, and anything NOT A BLOG. The current one would be fine if I could get the YouTube links to display properly on smaller devices, but no matter what settings I play with it’s never the proper aspect ratio. Of course, most of the templates I’ve been looking at don’t display YouTube videos on the front page. Why not? Another irritating trend I’m seeing is AI being built into some of the themes… Jesus Butt Fucking Christ, I don’t want AI in my theme suggesting to me how to write a post!

There are still multiple search terms I haven’t tried yet, but I’m getting tired of just searching for “Blog Theme” and having it also pull up business templates. It would be ideal if they added an option to uncheck options like e-commerce and the others just so I can find something that doesn’t make me look like a business corporation. This is a personal blog that shares videos… how is that so hard to accommodate for?

The Blog Fashion Show Continueith

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Original Artwork Can Be Found Here

Another evening spent playing with the site… I didn’t like the lack of widgets when looking at blog posts, and while I’m on the fence about this current template it does at least get a better load score than the previous one. I’m comfortable leaving it like this for now, and I can start looking at other themes and plugins at a more leisurely pace. So far the only thing I don’t like about this one is the lack of banner options. That can be saved for another night. I also did some database pruning, got rid of a bunch of entries from all the templates I’ve been checking out.

Now I can spend the remainder of my evening chilling out.

The First Coat Of E-Paint

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If you can’t tell (or you’re reading this from your subscriptions) I’ve been giving the ol’ place a makeover. I haven’t decided if I’ll keep this appearance or not, but so far I’m digging it. If I do end up finding something better though I will be switching it out. Looks nice on all my devices! The current banner is a placeholder until I decide to change it to something else, or if I decide to delete it in place of a background image… decisions decisions.

Preparing For Another Round Of Site Renovations

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Been playing around with blog configurations this evening, thinking it’s time for another update on appearances, and eventually a complete revamping under the hood. The latter will need more time to put together, might make a autumn/winter project out of it. In the meantime I’ve been looking at newer themes to run that fit what I’m doing. This one has been nice, but I might do better with something more modern, will continue my wordpress adventures with fresh eyes tomorrow.

Unplanned Downtime

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Last night I updated one of my plugins before powering myself off for the evening, only to notice today that there was no website! Did some detective work and it happened to be one of the plugins that got updated. Fortunately it’s one I haven’t used in awhile for polling. so I’ve since removed it. As it is I’ve already used Mastodon a couple times for user polling on certain subjects, and I get a good outcome each time I’ve made a poll.

Anyways, we’re back!

I Have Achieved Blogception

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I’ve added an RSS feed from my Mastodon to my WordPress! If you look to your left on desktop, or scroll to the bottom on mobile – you’ll find my Mastodon feed! I’m starting to get a modest follower base on there! Lots of fellow users of the Deck of Steam, and Linux nerds. So far my overall experience with it has been good, even boosted a celebrity or two. 😉

Some Changes Be A Comin’

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Image courtesy of wallpapertag.com

I’ve begun looking into doing a redesign of the website, already downloaded some new templates and have already played with customising them. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite awhile now, and I want to make it look good on as many devices as possible. I sometimes check my blog on smaller devices, like my tablet, laptop, etc and want to look into making it look nice on as many platforms as possible. Spring has sprung, and it’s time to give this place a bit of a facelift. I might play with it a bit more tomorrow, but don’t expect any changes overnight.

It’s Been A Nerdy Ass Weekend

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The blog(s) went down again this morning — fortunately it was right when I was waking up to check them. Everything seemed to clear up again when I removed the plugins folder, and that gave me a good excuse to start removing plugins that currently are currently not in use. I’ve been slowly adding different things back in throughout the day. Hopefully nothing funny happens while I’m at work tomorrow… I’d hate to have to think about it all throughout my shift.

On a brighter note I worked a little more in SFM on my October project. I’m thinking I might tear into the VM’s for the gameservers again in a day or two. I ran into a snag with the new GMod VM, and so far the easiest option for me would probably be to delete it and start over. It was still in a pretty basic setup, so it isn’t a big loss. I’ll also have to do the same for the Quake III VM’s in the future, but those have enough resources on them for now for me to not worry about it. Focus on fixing all of the other sheeeeeeeeet.

Unexpected Downtime

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If you happened to visit the website (or any of the other connected websites) and were unable to access it I have to apologise. I woke up this morning and found that none of my WordPress sites could connect to their databases, and I couldn’t properly get to it until I got off work several hours later. Fortunately I found the problem… sorta. There was an important process that appeared to have crashed, and in one terminal command I had everything back up and running within minutes of arriving home. I’m still not too sure how or why it crashed though, the logs don’t have much to offer me for clues. This goes without saying, but I will be keeping a close watch. It doesn’t appear to be anything malicious at least.

 

***Update***

I seemed to have triggered it again when posting. This will require further experimentation.