Stunslinger.com Blog

Looks like somebody forgot to renew his web hosting account…

Sorry to anyone who tried to come read my horribly influential blog and found a generic, “He doesn’t live here anymore” page.

I’d been toying with the idea of switching hosting, as this company isn’t the fastest or cheapest.  But I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.  And then I forgot to renew on time.

I’m really tired right now.  I don’t know what to write about.  You see, I have a goal to try and post every week day.  Obviously I don’t live up to this, and on weekends my posting definitely drops off, but still I try.

But then occasionally I encounter a case of blogger’s block.  I try to think outside the box, but sometimes (especially when I’m tired) nothing comes to me.

I thought about writing about the weather, since it’s making me homesick for Oregon.  But I already wrote a tweet about that, and I’ve blogged about it in the past.  So then I looked through my categories, seeing if that would inspire me.  Nothing.  I almost fired up Google Reader to just blow it off, but then I thought I could always write another meta blog.

This is actually similar to something I do in therapy.  I operate from an interpersonal perspective, and a big part of interpersonal techniques is altering the relationship.  For example, most people expect certain responses from other people, and that’s part of the problem.  Basically, people learn problematic behaviors (especially relationship problems) because they’re expecting a weird response from others.  So part of what I do is comment on the relationship, the interaction going on between myself and the patient, to teach healthy behaviors.  I don’t know if this makes any sense at all.  I’m tired and am probably not explaining it super well.

Anyway, I’ve found by talking about the relationship, and my reactions to the patient, I am more effective as a therapist.  There we go, that made sense.  That’s the bottom line.  And this post is sort of an example of applying this technique to blogging.

That’s right, I joined the twitter bandwagon. You can see it at the top of my page sidebar, above the top post below the RSS subscription link. I am using Alex King’s twitter plugin here on my blog, mainly so I can add tweets while I’m at work (they blocked the twitter page).

The funny thing is, a long time ago (before twitter) I thought about creating a blog with extremely short posts. Some sort of minimalist attempt to summarize the day: Worked a lot, watched wife make cards, tired. Thought it might be interesting in theory, but maybe not enough to attract much readership. Now I can have my mini blog posts along with my regular ones. We’ll see what happens.

Argh.  I just sat down and wrote out some things I’ve been thinking/feeling about a situation at my work.  Just as I was about to post it, I realized that even though I post anonymously (really, my name’s not actually Stunslinger) and I didn’t share any specifics about the situation, it still wasn’t professional.  And, ironically, I was complaining about these people being un-professional.

Sometimes I lament the fact that I can’t write about my work life.  So many of the personal blogs I read talk about the person’s life, and often contain posts about that person’s work.  They even post pictures of themselves, their family, and other personal details.  This is part of what makes their blogs interesting.  But I cannot do that.

I have to scrape together blog posts about my life outside of work, for the most part.  Sometimes I write something in reaction to a work situation, but I try to make sure it’s something that is generic enough that I’m not revealing any personal information.

Sometimes I think this hurts my readership.  But really, shouldn’t I see that as a challenge to transcend, rather than something to complain about?  Probably.  I need to re-frame this, which is something I teach my patients all the time.   I will work to overcome this challenge and bring the interweb my odd form of blogging.  After I sleep, anyway.  Good night.

For some reason I actually track my blog’s statistics.  For the past several months my site views have been consistently rising…but my RSS subscribers are at an all time low.  I guess all I should care about are the page views, since that’s what would matter if I choose to add advertising.  But for some reason I assumed there would be some relationship between the two.

Sorry my posting dropped off a bit there.  Had a busy weekend and then this week has been crazy.  I’m taking two vacation days this week, and when combined with the Fourth of July it makes for a five day weekend!  So, effectively I flip-flopped my week: instead of two off and five on, I have two on and five off.

Sounds great, right?  It is, now.  But yesterday and today it meant that I had to accomplish most of the things that normally take five days.  Ok, so maybe I exaggerate a bit.  But still…it made for some crazy rushing.

But now it’s over, and it’s my five day weekend.  Well, really the Friday night of my five day weekend.  So I’m happy.  I picked up Web Standards Creativity on the way home from work, so I’ve got a good computer book to enjoy.  Plus, my wife wants to watch all the Die Hard movies so we can go see the new one on Thursday.  Killer.

Hey there blog faithful, just wanted to explain what happened if you had trouble viewing my blog recently.  I just updated to the newest version of Wordpress, and it took a bit longer than I expected.  Then, when I made sure everything was uploaded, I found out I had to update my database to PHP5.  Then I found that none of my plugins survived the update, except Akismet.  I had to remember what all I had installed, then edit the source appropriately.

But it’s finally all set, now I need to make a change or two to make Wordpress create thumbnails for large images, and I’ll be a happy camper.

Wow, apparently I’ve been away for a while. I just realized it’s been over a week since my last post. I’ve been spending all of my time researching Wordpress as a CMS yet again, and I finally get it. I’m currently working on my first site with Wordpress as the backend, and I’m very pleased with the results. I’ll post later with more details.

On the Mac front, I just finally purchased a license for TextMate. I must say I really like this editor. It definitely speeds up my coding, and all the things I read about it when I was using a PC are true. Bliss.

I hope I haven’t lost too many readers during this time of radio silence. Here’s hoping a week away from the blog will have given me enough fresh ideas to bring my old readers back, and maybe even gain a few new ones.

I thought about naming this post “</radio silence>”, but then I thought that might reveal a bit too much of my inner geek.

I was watching some videos on YouTube yesterday and came across several diss songs/videos by some rappers.  This reminded me of the whole “beef” culture in rap, and how the main outcome of beef seems to be increased popularity.  This got me thinking about applying the same concept to blogging.

It seems like there is the opportunity to start a beef with another blogger, in order to increase traffic.  And, in the true tradition of beef, one would make entirely baseless claims that tear the other blogger down.  For instance, I could say Wil Wheaton’s only reader is his mother, and even she doesn’t like half his posts.  I could argue that Eric Meyer doesn’t know CSS from RSS, and couldn’t code his way out of a tabled layout.  Oh the beef I could start.

Of course then I’d have to be big enough to actually have these other bloggers take notice and return fire.  Although, in the rap world, it seems that rarely are the two artists well known.  Usually it’s some “up and comer” who takes on a big dog to get publicity.  So maybe this would work for me.  Of course, I’m too much of a “communal group-hug, happy go lucky, can’t we all just get along” loser to do any of this.  Plus, I really respect those two bloggers and wouldn’t want to tear down two of my RSS Reader heavyweights.

Just because I don’t have the stomach for it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work for you!

I must quickly explain why I still have not rolled out my blog design (I refer to it not as a redesign, because this site is just using a template, so I haven’t yet made a design that could be redesigned).  After all, didn’t I claim it was near completion a month ago?  I decided to experiment with a different method to create this design.  Basically, I started by stripping out all the CSS and just building it “organically,” piece by piece.  I knew I had an overall idea of what I wanted, but I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t have a visualized design before I started coding.

Well, it’s obvious this system didn’t work very well.  Basically I really liked my first few changes, but then ended up with a design that might be passable, but doesn’t really make me excited.  So I’ve been reading up about design theory and the process of designing websites and realized I need to create a design before I proceed any further.  I’ll be taking a number of things I really liked about my “organic” design and hopefully will tie everything together into a more cohesive whole.  This morning I sketched a thumbnail design of the site and like it better than what I’ve coded in the last couple months.

So tonight (or, realistically, soon) I’ll make a photoshop mockup and then get back to code.  So it’ll be a while.  But really, I always said I wanted the content to come first on my blog.  Maybe having a generic design has helped in that regard.