In anticipation of the upcoming new release of WordPress 2.3.0 in a couple of weeks, I thought it would be nice to have a more stable theme to work with.

Also, you might have noticed the little peeling thing in the top right hand corner.  We now have the ability to advertise products, sponsors, happenings, or just say Happy whatever day.

I am selling the script that does this,  for very very cheap, so if you are interested, just follow the links to me.

I am trying to come up with something that is not only lightweight, but that is also viewable in all browsers — including the inferior IE6

So, as I put the different themes up here, I will also post the names of those themes so that if you have a comment about them you can mention the theme name so I know what you are talking about.

The Current theme:

Equal Time v 2.1 beta

[Update #1:  I have settled on the current theme you see here.  There was a period of time this evening when there was a PHP error due to me upgrading the server to PHP version 5.2.0.  For some reason, the server balked at the update, and your browser didn't recognize the file type.  Obviously, that problem has been resolved.

I need to know if the page is being displayed properly in IE 6 or not.  None of my machines have IE 6 installed on them.

I will be working off and on throughout the weekend, getting all of the features back online here.  (Yes Frank, I will have the Site Meter up and running for you)]

First off, I am wondering why anyone would stick with a notoriously vulnerable browser, when a newer, more secure one is available.  My first piece of advice would be to quickly download IE7 and retire the older one to the dust bin.

Better yet, download FireFox, and  start enjoying the way most websites were designed.  It is faster, and a lot less bloated than its MicroShaft counterpart.

Because I haven’t used IE6 for over 18 months now, I had no idea that this site displayed differently than all of the other browsers.  Frank brought it to my attention this morning, but I have no way of verifying it.  I will try to search for a machine that still has IE6 installed on it to see for myself.

If there are a few of you who are still intent on using seven year old technology, I will try to fix this site so that you can view it like the rest of us.  It might be a bit difficult since IE6 does not render CSS2 standards at all (it barely renders CSS1 standards)

So if you are using IE6, I would appreciate it if you could send me a screen dump of what the site looks like to you.  You can email it to me at dave at donotspam dot org.

Over the past twenty-four hours, we have had some technical issues dealing with the network this server is on.

SPRY, our network and server provider, attempted a routine back up procedure early Monday morning, and should have been done in a matter of a few hours.  However, for some unknown reason, that backup continued on for over 24 hours before the process was killed by SPRY.

The backup was using over half of the available resources on the node, causing this site and numerous others to run excruciatingly slow.

We are back up to speed again for now.  I am sure the technicians are looking into what happened and will make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

So all’s well, that ends well.

Now if you want a more important poll, try this one:

I will be putting the daily poll in the right column. Someone will have to change it every day.  I decided it would be better to simply post a new poll inside of a thread whenever a poll is needed.

But first:

I understand that some of you have been having problems registering. I think I have solved the problem by installing a themed registration screen that did away with the Wordpress default.

BUT… (and this is important) you MUST be sure that the email address you use is a valid one. This is the only way you are going to get a password — through your mail. If you don’t get the password, check your junkmail folder. Sometimes things wind up in there and you don’t think to check that folder.

Now on to the real goodies:

Instant Chat Room

I have finally finished installing the Instant Chat feature on this site. It is fully AJAXED and you must be signed into your account to use it. Also, you must have Java enabled in your browser. (sorry, Mac users, some of you are SOL)

You can find the chat room by clicking on the tab at the top right of this page.

Avatars

Avatars are these cute little pictures that you are starting to see on the page, both in the posts and in the comments. You can add your own little avatar by either going to the bottom of a comment page or by going to your user profile.

There is a size restriction of 50 x 50 pixels. If your graphic is larger than that, it will be resized. Images should be no larger than 100k or you will get an error.

As you can tell, animated avatars are possible, but only if they are smaller than 50 x 50 pixels. (if the program has to resize a graphic, it will break the animation)

Eye Candy

There are some other little features that I’ve added here, and I plan on adding a couple of new things in the next couple of days.

And yes, I am on the verge of launching my new web hosting service.

Over the course of the weekend, I will be moving this site to a new server located here in the Seattle area. 

We moved web hosts last weekend.

If you are seeing this post, then you have arrived at the new server.

You might have noticed a couple of things — a new paint job, carpet, and furniture, but the real change is in the speed the page loads.

Why the move so quickly after the last move?

Well, frankly, IX Webhosting sucked. They did not live up to their claim of being the #1 webhost with a 99.99% reliability — unless I read it wrong and you could reliably assume that they would be down for that period of time.

I think I have learned my lesson about using a “shared” web hosting plan. They may be cheap, but eventually the hosts will fill up their servers with hundreds of other web accounts and everything will act as if you were swimming through Nickolodean goop to get to your site. But you get what you paid for, and cheap usually means unreliability.

Now we are on a virtual server through the Spry Networks. I have become my own webhost, and currently the only other website we are sharing the server resources with is Grouchy’s Liberaltopia. I pay quite a bit more to run my own virtual server and in order to offset some of the costs I will be offering to host a select few websites for other people. But instead of trying to cram 500 websites on a server, I will only accept no more than ten — at roughly the same price it would cost at a shared webhosting plan.

About the new look here.

WordPress has gone through a major upgrade in their publishing platform. The old theme here was specifically written for the WP 2.0 version, and while it would work in the WP 2.1 version, I needed to upgrade it to take advantage of some of the newer features. Besides, it can get a little boring seeing the same thing all the time.

So while we wait for everything to propagate over the InterTubes, I will be playing around with the theme design here.

[UPDATE:]  I didn’t get much time to work on this on Sunday.  I am still in the middle of a physical move to our new house.  Besides, I needed to let the DNS finish its propagation before I finish tidying up here.

[Second UPDATE:]  As in the song, Henry the Eighth, (yes, that dates me)  The second verse is the same as the first.  I haven’t had the time available to finish what I started here yet.  I am currently involved in another move — finishing up on getting out of the other house.  Two dump trucks full of Aaron’s crap on its way to the dump, and still another truckload to go.  (he has this thing about collecting stray computers, gadgets, and Alfa Romeos and dumping them where they are)

I have decided that I am no longer going to host any of my sites on “Shared Hosting Accounts” because we are severely effected by the hundreds of other accounts hosted on that same server.

Tonight I took the plunge and paid for a dedicated server at a data center right here in the Seattle area. It will cost me substantially more, but the benefits greatly outweigh the added costs.

We will be on our own server, just one hop off of the main gateway to the InterTubes. We will have a guaranteed set of resources that we will not have to share with anyone else. This means faster page loads and it will give me total control of what is happening.

Having my own server will allow me to offer web hosting services to other people for relatively cheap, and you KNOW I will be right on top of things. (If Mark Perkel can start his own web hosting service using these servers, then why the hell can’t I?)

I have the server right now. It is a Dual Xeon, Dual Core with a RAID-6 and six gigs of RAM. I will be moving this site over to the new server sometime in the next week or so, and after that I will be offering web hosting accounts to anyone who is interested.