Okay, I know I haven’t done much to the site for the past month. Recently I started working for a new company as their Network Administrator and I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time brushing up on Windows Server 2003 and Terminal Services. I’ve also been spending a lot of my evenings learning how to code in Ajax and jQuery so I can overhaul my Tasks Manager to be more of an web-based application instead of the simple HTML version.

Though my site has been live for maybe 3 months, I have found that I am not happy with the layout and content. Originally I wanted the website to contain some personal photos, talk about my hobbies and keep my friends and family updated with things in my life. Now that I’ve been using the site it’s not very functional for me. My plan is to finish up with rebuilding my Task Manager and then I plan on changing the entire layout of the site again to more suit my needs while still being able to keep my friends and family up-to-date.

Until then, I’m sorry for not keeping things updated and I know you’ll like the site more once I change things around again. Remember… Progress is good, but sometimes it’s slow.

theBlaine

I’ve done some major back-end work on the site in the past couple of days. It wouldn’t be noticeable to anyone unless you dug into the code and the structure of the site, but it makes things easier for me from a website maintenance stand-point.

Continue reading ‘Recent Changes to the Site’ . . .

I’ve been pretty busy in the past 2 weeks and today I was finally able to sit down and play a bit with my site. I’m creating some new content boxes that will be used on the site to contain text. Now I’ll be able to start adding more content and adding more to the site. To be quite honest, this article doesn’t really serve a purpose. I’m writing it to test out several features.
Continue reading ‘Content Ready’ . . .

Tonight I modified the way my site is generating meta data. Meta data’s purpose, is to show search engines how to index my articles in their database. I won’t go into the details, but since this change is transparent to most of my visitors and the subject of meta data for Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, can be complex and detailed. So instead, I will give you a quick explanation of what I did.
Continue reading ‘Updated META data for SEO’ . . .

Tonight I added a background image to all the pages. The image is a montage of some of my interests. The plan is to have a unique background image for each category to help you recognize where you are at inside the site. But for now I’m just going to use the same image for all pages.
Continue reading ‘Added Background’ . . .

To help you with navigating this website I have added “Breadcrumbs”. Breadscrumbs are the text links above in the red bar that show you the path to your current location in the website. As you go deeper into the the site or into a category, the links give you an easy way to back out and find your way home.
Continue reading ‘Added Breadcrumbs’ . . .

I turned on trackbacks which will allow me to make a reference inside of an article to another website’s article and it will notify that site admin that he’s been referenced on my site. This is, in turn, automatically generates a comment on their article with a link back to my website to help generate traffic and give credit to other authors when I reference their work.
Continue reading ‘Trackbacks and RSS feeds’ . . .

I just started adding articles to the website and in less than an hour I am finding many things I want to change to make the site more user friendly and easier to navigate. Below is an on-going list of things I want to add/change/fix in no particular order. I will try to get to them as I go along on my on-going effort to keep things on this site fresh.
Continue reading ‘Website To-Do List’ . . .

Right now the site has a bunch of videos and pics and not much else. I’m filling up the site with the easier things first so I can give you something to look at. Soon there will be a lot more things to waste your time on while you’re here at my website, but for now you’re going to have to settle for a few videos and pictures. I’ll add more in the near future. This is just to get the site up and going.

This is the first test-drive on the new site. For the next few nights I’ll be ironing bugs I find as I start to kick the tires on this baby.

Here is a list of a few of the things the site can currently do:
Continue reading ‘Beta Release’ . . .