It appears that a bug has been produced in my blog software. The theme I have set up keeps reverting to the default theme at an undetermined interval. To get to the bottom of this I searched the Wordpress Forums and found out that it is a small problem related to the index.php and the style.css. It appears that if there is any problem with these two files in your theme template the Wordpress backend will just revert to the Default Kubrick template. As you can imagine this is a little annoying. I am attempting to fix the bug and the problem will be taken care of shortly. In the meantime thanks for being patient!

So some of my friends have been asking me why I am not on MySpace. To be perfectly honest I really did not like MySpace. As a designer and sometimes web developer I felt it was a little too juvenile and trendy. Still I cannot ignore the fact that the site is a great social networking tool. So this past week I swallowed my pride and created a profile on MySpace. This profile was not technically my first. For the past few months, I have been using MySpace under a pseudonym that I enact sometimes on the internet. The reason for setting up an alias profile was so I could do some research and figure out how to hack the most horrible interface on the web without being found by friends, and former classmates. For the amount of popularity the service has you would think the UI would look slightly better. Anyway, I got to work and started to research the possibilities of adjusting the design of my profile.

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So after launching Haddon West FC’s web site I could not keep myself away from it. All I felt like doing was enhancing. It became a mini-obsession. I started by going to Google and finding out how their AdSense worked. I have very little content for the site at the moment, and this seemed like a good way to add some without having to generate it myself. So I signed up and was on my way! After a very short approval period that Google has; I received an email allowing me access to Google AdSense. Once there, I chose the type of graphical styling for my content savvy ads, and Google generated the code. I wanted something non-obtrusive but prominent. Google AdSense gives you choices out of a fixed set of formats for your ads. Most of these are pretty basic; consisting of a vertical or horizontal scheme, dissected into real estate friendly boxes of various widths and heights. Once I found a size I liked I was able to style the colors; creating a pallet which I could save for later use directly through my AdSense account. Next step was to click “Go” and that was it.

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So this week I set up my Linux box to be a Samba server; making it easier for me to do web development. Since I use Dreamweaver for my web development environment I have been itching to make use of the ability to use a development server to test your code and hacks. Setting up Samba on my Kubuntu box(Heavyarms) was a bit of a dance. Apparently just starting the Samba in Linux is not enough. You have to do a bit of configuring in both the Linux and XP environment, to get it to work correctly. Thank the computer gods for creating online documentation. Ubuntu’s How-To section of their forums is invaluable for the Linux user with a slow learning curve. After wrestling through Samba I had to set up Heavyarms as an intranet server as well. This allows me to view the by-product of my labors without having to type in the IP address of the server each time. Setting up Apache was pretty easy for my first time. So after loading PHP5 and MySQL I was ready to set up the DNS configuration to recognize http://heavyarms as my local intranet. Now with all working well I am able to test my web development with ease. I must say it really makes a difference when you can test before you go live. One of the best advantages is that I am able to design different Wordpress themes without having to use my live website for testing.

Okay the upgrade to Wordpress 1.5.2 went off with success. I also found the time to do some much needed graphic updates and a little CSS tweaking. I am not sure I am happy with the dots in the header. That really means that they are not staying. Anyway now that the site is looking a little more like I want it I am going to try, yet again, to get my ass writing here at least 3 times a week and working on the site as a whole. I have put it to the side long enough and it is really time to crack down. Just so you know that is the pep talk I give myself every time I look at it. If you have a better one please send it off.