Blog: Entries Tagged With 'site-announcements'

I'm only about 20 years late to the party, but I finally added support for tags to my blog posts. I've retroactively applied tags to most of my posts, and clicking a tag will bring up all posts matching that tag.

I also fixed the search page, sorta. It's a little more flexible in finding results now and supports multiple keywords. The one limitation is that words smaller than 3 letters are not searchable (and thus ignored) due to how the database is configured.

So... why do I continue insisting on rolling my own code instead of embracing something like WordPress and the many features it offers? After all, I even set up a WordPress for the wife to use for her own blog.

Well, the purpose behind my blog and site has always been about chronicling and creating, and creating for me is just as much about building useful things as it is about writing content. And sometimes... I just build because it's fun. That drive to build things is what drew me to engineering in the first place, and was guiding my life even before I knew what a computer was.

Other than the wife, I don't know if there's anyone who still reads my blog. Life is kind of like that. But I'll keep writing and creating all the same. Not primarily for others (though if you are still here, thank you!), but because I find enjoyment in it.

So with my blog, as with life, there is more to come!

Well it only took about ten years, but I finally updated this site's layout to a mobile-friendly and more visually streamlined version. There are lots of little things that I cleaned up, and I revamped the Articles section and the Blog Archives page. I also switched away from XHTML in favor of HTML 5. Yeah, only eight years behind there.

So if you're on mobile, you'll no longer need to pinch-zoom to move around the page, and navigation links will no longer appear too small to read. If you're on desktop with any normal sized monitor, you'll get a little landscape graphic in the background, a slightly desaturated variant of the landscape graphic I now have on the homepage.

Lately I've been messing around in Photoshop and creating some 2D landscapes. Given the name of this site, I figured that it was about time that I had a picture of a dragon somewhere on it. So since I suck at drawing, I bought a stock image of a dragon and edited it into my landscape. I like how Photoshop's tools allow you to create some basic but cool-looking images without the need for a lot of talent. Hopefully over time, I'll grow my artistic ability and maybe even learn to draw some dragons of my own.

So yeah, since I was never really using my homepage for anything notable, I put up a 2D landscape there which is hopefully a little more interesting. Someday I'll figure out what I actually want to do with this site.

So to the one or two people who still visit my site and read my blog, thanks for being with me all these years, and I hope you enjoy the update as much as I enjoyed working on it.

This entry is a little redundant, but as I said on the homepage, I'm in the process of revising the layout on this site. If you don't like gory technical details (I'm thinking of one person in particular ;p) feel free to stop reading here! I promise I won't be sad.

Yesterday I transferred my domain registration and hosting to DreamHost. The transfer from GoDaddy failed a few times because I didn't know my domain's authentication code, my domain was locked, and private registration was on. But once I got around those, respectively, everything was finished within a few hours. It normally takes a few days, but GoDaddy allowed me to confirm the transfer on their end, and it went through immediately. DreamHost automatically changed the nameservers to their own, so no more Netfirms, unless I wanted to change them back (haha!).

Migrating the site went almost without a hitch. The hardest part was figuring out how to export and import the MySQL database. Aside from that, I only had to change a variable in my scripts to allow interfacing to DreamHost's MySQL server.

So now I'm good on my domain registration and hosting for another year. I'll be working on the layout and adding new articles in the next couple weeks. I think.

Alright. I've been putting it off for too long. The redesign of my site has been long overdue.

For the past couple weeks I've been working on the new site- from designing a new layout, to writing more flexible code. I'm finishing everything up this week, and my site will officially be moved to dragonskies.com. It'll go up this Saturday.

This will be the last post I make here at Anson's Blog!

For those whom I haven't told, this blog can also be accessed through the URL dragonskies.com. I've had that domain for a couple months and set it up to redirect here.

When (or if?) I finally get around to designing my new site, it's going to be at that domain.

I finally got that tagboard up and running! Now you can leave feedback, ideas, or just chat away.

I finally made a new layout! Well, sorta. I added a bunch of graphics. Hope y'all like it!

Just about everybody seems to have a blog these days! With the onset of college rapidly approaching (four more days, gasp), I've decided that these next four years just may produce something worthy of recording. So without further ado.. Anson's Blog is born. (I'll have to think of a better name)