As this site has gotten stale of late I decided a New Year design refresh was in order. Frequent postings are not this site’s strong point so content layout needed to be altered to address other areas. I used a masterful theme called The Morning After by Arun Kale as the framework for the content layout. The new theme is based on a magazine style layout providing access to my other internet dwellings and interests.

Of highlight the most recent posting of substantial length will be front and center on the home page, left hand column. A featured article can be found right below the latest post and Asides or short posts, links most likely, are found last in the left column. The two columns to the right of the main content display links to other sites I frequently utilize or update. The design is not final and I will be tinkering with different areas in an attempt to fine tune the visual elements. Hope you enjoy the new layout and design. Drop a comment to tell me what you think of my efforts.

I am going to give this blog one more shot. If I can bring myself to post to at least once a week I will keep it going otherwise this thing is headed for the trash bin. Sure, I have plenty to write I just lack all motivation to type it out. Now that summer is slipping by I will hopefully be able to allocation appropriate attention to these pages.

New header image and addition of a favicon; woot woot.

Please pardon the mess while I tweak this new design. Over time I will add new components and enhanced functionality. This is the first time that I am trying to write code while the design is live. The goal is by making it live I will work on this site with more regularity. Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the new style.

Well that was quite an exercise. Comments are now working and yes it was something that I had changed that caused the error. The issue resulted from the htaccess mod that force strips the www in the URL. I assume this has something to do with the HTTP_REFERER in comments-post.php. This of course what after I tried different themes, disabling all my plugins and even going to the great length of deleting my entire website (and I mean everything but the db) and painstakingly rebuild it. As I feel that the triple dub is irrelevant today I will work on a little php hack to get comments working in the environment I prefer. So go ahead and leave me some nasty comments now.

It appears as if my comments are inoperable; as in readers can not post a comment to an entry. Not that this event is catastrophic for rarely do readers leave comments. I fear there is a compatibility issue with my permalink structure and either my current theme (not likely) or my host. I vaguely remember reading some issue with certain permalink structures and Dreamhost. Can I just pay someone to research this and fix it for me? I just do not have the energy to track this issue down – oh wait you can’t contact me because my comments are down and I have not gotten around to putting a contact form on here. What a predicament.

Posting has been slow and sporadic at best the last two weeks. Much of my time has been spent working on the house. Painting a spiral staircase is a major pain in the ass. Contorting one’s body to get a paint brush to cover all cracks and crevasses can be a real challenge.

I have not spent enough time tweaking this new-ish site design. I actually just realized how shitty the new pages look in Internet Explorer. I need to recommit myself to whipping this half-assed website back into shape.

The wife and I are heading back to C-bus to visit family, friends and cheer on our beloved Buckeyes. Hopefully our high perch in the southstands will be an enjoyable vantage point to watch the game. GO BUCKS!

A very cool “web art project” by Thomas Baekdal.

To continue on the subject of spam; not only does my new mobile number get a random spam txt but my blog is getting hammered  with comment spam. Although it sucks to moderate your friends I am glad that I choose to not leave commenting wide open. That is until now; I just enable Akismet this morning, and at 7:20 tonight it has already grabbed 28 spam comments and/or trackbacks. Unbelievable, do you think these assholes actually get paid off of comment spam?

If you have not taken notice, stickrod.com is cloaked in a new theme. I have decided to go the route of live coding; that is making style changes to the site as it is, live. I reckon this will force me to get off my ass and start implementing design elements that I have scratched on paper. The base of this design is the Wordpress template unsleepable which in turn is based upon K2. Both masterful works in their own right. There are more than a few broken items stinking up the place; I plan on tackling them one-by-one hopefully rendering a usable (readable) blog as a result. Lastly, I have abandoned the site design version numbering for it really does not apply to this mess.

While out for a friend going away party I was criticized, openly, for my lack of updates on this here weblog. As life has taken a sustained accelerated pace I have had less time to allocate to my plethora of hobbies / projects. Highlighting one of these hobbies, this site design has been moving around with some improved bits here and there. I have now definitivly decided upon a final design and will work diligently to implement within the next week or so.

In other news, the wife and I have begun to wrangle with a crash diet and a healthier life-style there after. An outline of the workings of said plan and periodic progress reports are forth coming.

So sit tight sports fans as I ramp up the writing and design efforts.

Onto the third variation of this site design. I scrapped the last layout and started anew with a single column layout of K2. Only issue is Internet Explorer really sucks ass. Why would Microsoft not make a standards compliant web browser? The new site has some really cool features, e.g. rolling archives, but the look terrible in IE and I really don’t feel like recoding the CSS for that delinquent browser. To get you read for the switch here is a little vid for some amusement.

Enough with the procrastination; I am reintroducing stickrod.com to the triple dub world / blog-o-shere in 2006. The last year, two thousand and five, has been a year of change not only for this website but for the Stickrod life as well. Let me briefly chronicle the events. The headline affair was joining Catherine in holy matrimony on February 5th; quite a grandiose event. This followed closely by a step up the corporate ladder with a new company and a residence reposition to the windy city of Chicago.

Now for the more technical changes as if marriage, job and a new city were not enough. This site has relocated as well moving from my basement to a professionally hosted environment at Dreamhost. No longer do I fret about power outages or IP address changes in the middle of the night. CMS is now run through WordPress (no longer Movable Type) which is taking me longer to learn than first thought. The current design is no where near my vision for the site so changes will be frequent and drastic as will be witnesses by repeat visits. The core theme is currently and for the foreseeable future K2 by Michael and Chris with some lame attempts on my part to alter the CSS to my liking. As I was reading thought some of my old posts from the previous life I had a moment of clarity and realized that I generally disliked what I had written and decided not to upload the posts to this new site. Wiping the slate clean and starting anew is invigorating; breathing life (hopefully) into this once dull blog.

I hope that you enjoy the content that I throw to the world in IO form.