Moving on up

Asisaid (as the guinea pig of my sites) is going to be picking up and moving to a new box as soon as WHOIS updates. If things get a little weird for the next day or two, don't worry, it should only be temporary.

Of course, feel free to let me know if you can't get to asisaid at all, or something like that…

Why am I moving asisaid? Well there's a good reason, but I'm too tired to tell it right now, so I'll let you know that (along with my reaction to The Passion) on the other side of this DNS update.

Site Design

Ok, so its time for the Christmas decorations to come down. Actually it was time along time ago. My problem is that I was really tired of the look I had before I switched to the Christmas layout, so now I have to figure out another new look to replace the Christmas one. I haven't figured such a design out yet.

I'm thinking about keeping the hills that currently have a nativity on them but making them green and grassy. Any other ideas?

Call for Blogs

This message is for two requests. As I announced a few months ago, FaithTree.com now allows users to place their favorite blogs on their customizable front page, just like you can local and national news, tech news, Bible quotes, local weather etc. You can find the few that I put up right here. I didn't add all of my blogroll, although I am planning to.

1. My first request is to hear from you about some of your favorite blogs that you think might make a good addition to FaithTree.com's listings. Maybe picking your top favorites would be best, but if you can't decide, that's alright. Just let me know what you like.
2. The other request is that, if you like the idea of seeing a customizable Christian home page that can take blogs as feeds, that you might consider mentioning this post on your own blog so that I can gather a good selection of blogs for this project.

The only real catch is that the blog must be Christian and agree with Christian Scripture as interpreted by historic Christian belief (the Apostle's Creed and Nicene Creed are a good base for this judgement). Essentially, anything that would go on Blogs4God can go on FaithTree.com's blog selection. This may change in the future (perhaps some secular blogs will be allowed), but for now that's the safest way to insure that the blogs meet our guidelines for content.

Once a blog is listed, it will be given a unique ID. If the blog owner wants to make it easy for people to add the blog to their FaithTree.com home page, they can follow some simple instructions on how to do so. This all works much like it did on the old “My Netscape” that existed in the days when Netscape was still a force to be reckoned with. If you are interested, please indicate so and I'll post about that.

Thanks for your help with this project!

New Look, Same Great Taste

Well, I've been planning to bedeck asisaid for Christmas since the end of October and that fit in neatly with my desire for some improvements in the site's design. Christopher's recent reworking of What in Tarnation!?!? and Avoiding Evil got me even more in the mood to redesign. While I'm still working on some things (like redoing the navbar categories — they really don't fit as well as they did before the site became mostly centered around this blog), I've pretty much revised the look. It's about time: not much has changed on the site for almost two years and I was getting tired of the way things looked.

Obviously, some of it is season specific (it's Ccchrrriiissstmmmmassssss allll oooovverrr the woooooorrrlld… uh, ahem) , but what do you think overall? Is it an improvement? I've tested it on Mozilla, Konqueror and Internet Explorer and everything checks out. I would have tried Safari too, but my KVM switch seems to be getting ready to buy the farm and I can't control my G5 very well atm. sigh

By the way, I realized that last week marked the one year anniversary of the first time I was aware that someone other than Ciaran (who gave me the software to start this blog) was reading this blog — Mr. Wright! It also marks a year since I added comments, so perhaps Christopher, or someone else, was here before that, although I rarely posted anything that was very interesting prior to the redesign of the blogging software that added comments.

I made it!

Well, if I don't count the fact that my one post was a comment/post “in exile” while the server was down on the 16th of October, I have succeeded in posting every day this month. I've been meaning to attempt this ever since Christopher accomplished the same feat in February.

Hope everyone had a nice Halloween yesterday. Did you get many Trick-or-Treaters? I probably had 35-40… my uncle, who lives near by, got about 80!

Having a WITty Day

Well, Christopher is busy this week, so he invited me (as well as some really great bloggers, a few of which are on my blogroll) to “sub” for him. I just put up my first post; it's about reading blogs. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, so why not stop by and give your comments, here.

Bzip2: Ubercompressor for Everyone

I realized I had filled up my hosting quota (ouch!) and so I logged onto ssh and started to clean up my account. I found asisaid.com's logs were about 20 megabytes and FaithTree.com's were taking up a pretty good amount too (although I had started those over about two months ago), so I compressed 'em to start fresh. Thanks to the powerful bzip2 compression tool, I was able to take about 30 total megs of logs and shrink them to about 2 megabytes using bzip2's best compression mode.

So that leads to two points: (1) If you tried to post here and couldn't, please try again — there's room now. I think this may have been the problem with CS-FSLUG too, so CS members should try reposting as well. (2) Try bzip2 if you haven't previously.

And the moral of the story: watch out for runaway log files!

Well, There's Always Next Month

[Update: Since I quoted the text that would have gone on the blog if it had been up, I took Kevin's advice and backdated this entry.]
Up until yesterday I was proceeding along well with my goal to blog at least once a day for an entire month (previously I've never gone for 15 days without at least a one day pause). Unfortunately something took down at least a good portion of the datacenter my site is in, thus preventing me from continuing my attempts.

Unfortunately something else [other than yesterday morning's Slashdotting] has taken down my sites, all of my clients' sites, and my hosting company’s site for the last three or four hours (must be something bigger than a simple Slashdotting or such, since they have 20 or more servers and they all seem to be MIA at the moment). sigh I’ve been trying to post a blog entry every day this month, so I guess this comment will have to count as one because it certainly doesn’t look like my server will be back up any time soon.

At first, the obvious solution seemed to be to just do a post on Sakamuyo, but its on the same company's systems as asisaid, so that didn't work either. Oh well.

More Stock

For those that missed the last issuing of stock, I've issued more asisaid.com shares of stock at BlogShares. Take a look, here.

Get yer asisaid shares!

Well, I haven't been messing with BlogShares much lately, but I decided to today. I accidentally pushed this blog way over the edge and crashed it to 1/4 its old BlogShares value. It has almost regained all of its value however from me buying a large number of newly issued shares (and through some other buying I've almost gotten back to my old $4.3 million in BlogShares worth).

At any rate, there are presently 700 newly issued shares available at $23.38 a piece. If you'd like a few shares, why not jump over here right now? This is an ideal time to pick up new asisaid.com shares if you lost yours when Just James Productions quite maliciously did a hostile takeover last month.

Disclaimer: For anyone who isn't familiar with BlogShares, this is a fantasy stockmarket. I'm not really worth 4.3 mil., and the money you use to by asisaid.com shares is fictional money. Just thought I'd mention that in case you'd never heard of BlogShares before.