I have committed an almost-major redesign of this site. It’s about 98% done, ready enough to be live now at this point.

I’ve been doing a minor redesign of this site over the past week using xampp so I can work locally. I highly recommend it. I figure this new theme is ready enough to go live so I can tidy up the loose ends. Most everything should be working and displaying more or less correct. Going live, I immediately saw some issues needing to be addressed. Please bear with as over the next short while, I’ll be tweaking things and probably bouncing back and forth between the old theme and this new one.

I was looking at this site through a text-only browser this morning and saw some issues. Looking a little further, I realized that this site hasn’t changed much in two years and several upgrades of Wordpress. There’s a lot of redundancy in my style sheets and now is a perfect time to re-do everything, all nice and clean. A complete redesign would be nice, perhaps, but all i’m going to bother with is a good scrubbing of the code and style sheets.

I’m not going to bother taking the site offline—I don’t suspect this will take long. You may however notice that stuff may look out of whack. It will be fixed soon.

Bear with.

The sidebar section containing all the links, categories and archives was getting way too cluttered for my liking, so I freed up some space by moving the largest of the sections, the archive list, to it’s own separate page, whicch you’ll notice is now listed in the sidebar under “Navigate”.

This evening, I made a switch to a new plug-in to handle my Technorati Tags. Since the move to WordPress 2.0, I’d been having problems with my old tag manager, Bunny’s Technorati Tags and Ultimate Tag Warrior came highly recommended, so I decided to give it a try and see. Immediately I noticed that it was in a much bigger league and even though Bunny’s has just recently been fixed with 2.0, I made the call and switched.

So I’m liking this new plug-in and everything looks sunny and joyful, except for the fact that all my tags that were assigned in the past via Bunny’s are no longer around. That sincerely blows, but whatever. There’s a way to rescue them, but as of this moment a bit to A.D.D. to manage it slogging through help files and forums. When I do get it down, I’ll note how I did it here. For now, I just wanted to post something, just to see UTW in action. Sweet.

Update:

Now I am seriously impressed. Within ten minutes of posting this entry, the creator of UTW popped on by and clued me in on how to rescue all my old tags. That is way cool. Thank you Christine D. UTW is a great plug-in and it’s developer made my day!

A reader who for one reason or another is not able to use RSS feeds wrote to me asking if there was another way to be notified when a new post is made to this site. Ever the intrepid do-gooder, I enabled readers to sign up for email notifications using this fine plugin. You’ll notice that in the lower part of the right-hand sidebar, under Syndicate, along with the RSS feed links, you now have a form to input your email address. If you are able to use RSS, I recommend you stick with it, but if not, you now have another option. Rest assured, daveb will not share your email for any reason and you may unsubscribe at any time. If you do sign up, yet are not receiving the notifications, let me know.

This site’s not going anywhere. I think I’m just going to take a vacation for a bit. I’m working slowly on a redesign. Best thing to do is subscribe to the RSS feed (you’ll also find a link at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar on this page), that way you’ll be alerted when things start picking up again. Anyways, like I said… short vacation.

Thanks,
daveb

If you glance to your right at the sidebar, under the heading of Navigate, you’ll see a new link called ‘Photos‘. Clicking this link will allow you to browse a shitload of pictures I’ve taken in the past 4-5 years. All the images are actually hosted on my Flickr account, but I am using a WordPress plugin called Falbum that makes use of Flickr’s API. It’s neat. It’s purty. I likes it.

I’ve got everything working, but please bear with me as over the next couple days I tweak things here and there with this photo album.

If you’ve visited this site recently and noticed a big fat WordPress connection error instead of my blog, I apologize and ask you to please bear with. I switched hosts recently and apparantly they are having problems with their MySQL. They tell me they’re working on it so I’ll give them a couple more days, but if the issue’s not resolved, I’ll be moving this site elsewhere. If you visit and do happen to get the error message, try checking back in a few minutes, it usually remedies itself. Again, sorry for the trouble.

Hi kids! davebgimp.com is currently hosted by a crappy-ass company whose servers have crashed one too fucking many times. Their customer support is farmed out of Croatia (not that I have anything against Croatia at all) and they just all around suck big donkey balls. I am in the process of switching to what I hope will be a more reliable host. The process should be seamless and finished at some point over the course of the next two days. Please bear with me while this is happening and please drop me a line if you notice any errors or problems. Hopefully all will go well. By the way, if you’re shopping around for a web host, you’d do well to stay away from aplus.net. They really suck and have some sketchy ass business practices. If you want to know more about just how shady this company is, don’t take my word for it, just do a Google search or do a search at webhostingtalk.com for more disturbing information about this company.