As you may have noticed by now, I change the site around a little and made a new layout. First of all, I moved the site from my Site5 account to my Dreamhost account. No particular reason really, but now that Dreamhost has these insane limits, I prefer to keep everything in one place. Also, Site5’s admin panels really sucks ass.

The theme/layout I made is basically a ripoff/mix between Minimalist Fever by Remex, Foliage Mod by Derek Punsalan, and last but not least, my old site. As you can see, it’s not very extravagant, and it’s more or less the same it was before, only a bit more minimalistic perhaps, plus it is now fluid width.

You might think it’s too minimalistic. The reason I made it so is because basically anyone who reads this page already knows me, I see no reason to have a mile long about page or lots of links and stuff. It’s just supposed to be my journal, nothing more, nothing less.

There’s probably a lot of old posts that might look sort of screwed up with this new design, but I hope to have fixed the worst problems. Let me know if you find any significant bugs or weird errors though. General comments are welcome too. I just decided to make this a few hours ago, so there hasn’t exactly been to much work put into it.

My cousin just had her birthday, so on Saturday a few from the family went out to eat at a local Big Horn Steak House restaurant. I love going there, as the food is just delicious, steaks never taste this good at home.

As most of you will know, I released my new Elma site on the 31st of January. I’ve spent quite some time working on it the last couple of weeks, it was a big relief to finally have a working site and to get it out there and officially declare it functional. It was initially just an idea I got some time last year, after getting tired of constantly having to manually update everything, which led to the demise of my site that lasted quite a few months. Then last November I finally pulled myself together and started working on the idea a bit more seriously, got stuck and procrastinated the development for a short while. January was the first time I really got somewhere with what I was trying to do, and from there on the work was easy. I couldn’t thank milagros and vk enough, it probably wouldn’t have been finished if I didn’t have their help through the development.

I’m really happy about the result, and the response was rather overwhelming, with over 100 people already registered. Initially I just figured it would help bring the site back alive for the few people that kept playing my levels, but it ended up exposing even more people to my levels. Yay!

Just after New Year I had lost about a week’s worth of posts because of some disk corruption at my host. Seeing as I had been a happy customer with WebHostingBuzz for a year without any problems, and after all - every webhost can have some unforeseen troubles. It wasn’t much I had lost after all.

Now, about a week ago I opened my page to find (yet again!) that there had been some MySQL database mistakes. I had lost a complete month’s worth of data. If it had only been this site, it wouldn’t have mattered much since I’ve only done a few posts during January, but I recently started working on my new Elma page, and not only had I lost some rows, but complete tables. This pissed me off, specially since I’ve been lazy with backupping of my databases. You don’t exactly expect this to happen several times a month, and at the very least you’d be able to rest confident that your webhost does some backups themselves.

So I shoot off a support ticket to check what’s up. The reply:

Well that’s nice. “… one our Support Techs had accidentially wiped critical mySQL data”. Then also the little paragraph about backups being disabled, without any notification at all. All this was enough to make me change webhost the same day.

So there’s why my page might have been unavailable the last week. I signed up for an account at site5.com, and I also have an account at dreamhost.com for my Elma site among others.

Made a quick favicon just for the heck of it.

I just changed the design a little bit by adding the fade in the background. I’m not completely sure if it’s better than before or not, but I will leave it alone for now.

After hearing about Google Sitemaps, I figured I’d give it a try, just for fun mostly. Since this site has well over a hundred different directories and pages, I had to find a clever way to make generating the sitemap as easy as possible. My first thought was to just use a few WordPress archive tags to generate a list with all directories. And since I didn’t get any other ideas or thoughts, so it was.

That output only gave me a list with linked text items, so I had to figure out a way to convert those into plain URIs.

Hm… regular expressions to the rescue. I had tried to figure out regex before, but never really got the hang of it for some reason. This time it seemed like a breeze however, I quickly managed to generate a working regex to extract the URI from the linked list. I’m sure there is a better or shorter code to give the same results, but I couldn’t care less, I’m just happy I got something working at all.

That code will match each line in the list, and give a backreference to the URI. With EditPad Pro, which has support for regex, it was very easy to convert the list of links into the XML format.

Of course, two minutes later I discover there’s already a WordPress plugin made by Arne Brachhold that does everything for you. But at least I learned some basic regex.

With the initiative by Abula, I did an attempt of making the site validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Geek dream number one? It was disappointingly easy after having converted the site to CSS. Basically all I had to do was go through my old posts and fix inappropriate tags like <center> and <font>, which took about one hour to complete. I was hoping it would give me a bit more satisfaction, but I guess I can’t have it all.

You might have noticed a slight change in the appearance of the site by now. I was getting a bit tired of managing entries with my very ghetto home made system, which basically was just a form that added the post to the SQL database, and nothing more. Editing was done through the phpMyAdmin system, which is very nice for working with databases, but not for managing a site.

I decided to make the move over to WordPress, which I have been comtemplating for quite a while now. So the last week has been spent configuring WordPress, making my old site into a theme and copying over all blog entries. Copying the entries was by far the most exhausting part of the whole move, since I had to manually copy them over to the WordPress format. I think Abula knows how fun something like that is. After copying over all the entries, it was time to make the theme. Since I basically had to start from scratch and dissect my code, I figured I might as well make the move over to a tableless design and only use CSS with div tags. That part took it’s toll on my sanity level, but with patience and some trial and error it worked out. It also helps to have div master Abula for help.

With the move over to WordPress and a more pure CSS based design, there has been a few minor changes and improvements as well. Categories are shown beneath the titel of each entry, the comments layout has had a minor face lift, and a much better archive page has seen the light. Unfortunately I’ve had to change the RSS feed address once again because of WordPress, the new one is http://www.skint0r.info/feed.

Manually copying over 160 entries - all with a very poor base layout so to speak, of course might not have been completely error free. I’m going to go over the old entries and try to put them in the right categories, correct errors and such, but if you see anything wrong with the page somewhere, please do let me know about it.

The page should display correctly in both the newest FireFox and Opera. Not surprisingly IE doesn’t display it correctly, but at least it’s not far from it. The only thing I’ve noticed it doesn’t get right is all the pseudo classes, which has some impacts on the design.

Since my RSS feed never really validated properly, I decided to fix the small errors today. Only had to set a proper encoding for the feed and change a few date problems. While I was at it I also added those validation buttons at the bottom of the right menu, just to brag. Every geek should have validated pages after all.

After reading a small excerpt from it over at one of my favorite blogs, I got quite interested and decided to check out more about the book titled Blink. Ended up eventually ordering it after checking out other excerpts from it, really looking forward to reading this one.

Another book I’ll definitely end up buying when it comes out is Nasjonalsatanisten.

In other sad news, after downloading “The Game - Dreams” on behalf of Sierra earlier today, I’ve gotten hooked to it myself and been listening to it non-stop all day.

Had to go to a stupid information meeting about the welfare situation today. It lasted a lot less than expected, only 20-30mins all in all. At least I think it was over by then, I left anyway.

Life is yet again good. Besides the fact that I soon will be seeing Iron Maiden live, I’ve recently been downloading new bands and checking out new songs. One of the best feelings in life must be when you find an awesome song that you instantly dig and can’t stop listening to. There’s been a lot of those lately, joy.

Updated the “about me” page a little bit, nothing drastic however.