From today henceforth, this site will be rebranded as ‘Perpetually Bored’ and the domain name will change accordingly from http://perpetuallybored.com to http://perpetuallybored.com. Old links will still work for as long as possible (looking at at least a year), and will redirect accordingly  thanks to the power of mod_rewrite and HTTP 301 Redirects. The crossover actually happened last week, but I saved the announcement until today to give time for DNS records to propagate and update.

Why? The site never really had a proper name to begin with. It used to be Thermonuclear Exchange, but that was too long. So it became just boring and plain perpetuallybored.com, after a handle I adopted for use. I choose the name ‘Perpetually Bored’ for a number of reasons, one of which is to express the state of life I’m constantly in, and another, was to convey the message that, in relation to the content, being in a state of boredom does give you creative ideas and encouragement to experiment and explore, the results of which can be very positive.

Apologies to those who have to update their bookmarks and such. I’ll try as much as I can to promise that this blog doesn’t go through another name change again.

I finally decided to let my Dreamhost account go. Having to live on the miserly pay given to National Servicemen here isn’t easy, and although US$10.95 a month could be considered a small amount, all these small expenses add up. Besides, it was under utilized – running just a blog which gets roughly about 10 hits a week. The cost could no longer be justified.

It’s possible to survive the tubes of the web without a single cent these days. In lieu of my web host, I’ll be using the following services:

• WordPress.com for the blog itself
• Flickr for any pictures present in the posts
• Drop.io or Amazon S3 if I need to distribute files to a number of people
• Syncplicity for backup

That’s it, the Internet survival guide for the tough times.

I’m sorry for switching the theme on you readers again. I realize that it’s not pleasant to have to relearn a new layout each time you visit my blog, but it had to be done.

It’s always the small UI quirks that get me. As much as I loved the soft look of the previous theme, the few small details kept coming back and bugging me.

First and foremost, was the location of the sidebar. Traditionally, the navigation menu has been on the left side of the page (or the top), but over the recent years, most blogs have it located on the right. I find that this makes tremendous good sense as it minimizes the distance one would have to move between the scroll bar and the navigation menu. Of course this problem wouldn’t exists if you used the wheel located on the mouse, but I’ve never been a great fan of that. The wheel doesn’t offer me the precision necessary to scroll text while I read and digest them. Don’t tell me about smooth wheel plugins, those make things even much worse. The wheel is great for other things, like scrolling text in blocks, or zooming, but just not for this purpose.

Secondly, the font size was just too darn small for when I’m not pressing my nose to my monitor. I’ve to squint to read when I’m tired. I’m not sure if any of my readers noticed, but I certainly did.

Another thing was the fixed size layout. At 1280×1024, the last great dividing resolution between normal LCD monitors and gigantic widescreen ones, and the last acceptable resolution to be running a browser in fullscreen (I hope if you have a 2560×1600 monitor, you’re not wasting all that screen real estate by running one instance of a browser full screened), there is just too much white space. I understand the rationale between packing text into a fixed and not too lengthy column facilitates better reading, but this goes back to the font sizes. If the font size was larger, the column could have been wider and thus, pack the same amount of characters on the same line despite the wider space to fill.

I could alternatively write my theme that suited all my quirks and oddities, but I’m horrible at CSS. As I told my project members once while we were developing a web application, “if I had my way, this whole site would have been nothing but plain text”. I’m pretty sure that if I got down to working on it, the result would be an abomination. Once again, apologies to my readers, but the village had to be destroyed in order to save it.

Murphy’s law struck when I was messing around with my site other day and I wrecked something unintentionally and had to revert to an older version of the database, resulting in the loss of one article, which I am too lazy to rewrite.

When I write an article, I only publish it in one location, here. On my local machines, I’ve a decent infrastructure for data integrity and keeping multiple backups, thanks a combination of RAID 1, Windows Shadow Copy and various other tools. The same can’t be said for my site, due to the fact that it is remote, and keeping a local and up to date copy of it isn’t exactly easy.

Well, what can I say now? Other than to keep a local copy or export the WordPress db after every article written. I will have to take steps to ensure that this does not happen again.

Yep, so I made up my mind and went with WebzPro. Spent quite awhile setting it up and toying with it. Speed is pretty decently, but a small tad slower than Blogspot. Lots of stuff are still being left to be done tomorrow, but settled with WordPress as my blogger.

I don’t really have a good reason for this, but its just one of the little things that annoy me. Graphical smilies. If I type a ‘:P’ it damn well better come out as a ‘:P’, not some ugly graphical representation of it. Its really a stab in the eye when reading a page full of text and then one of them appears and break your, err.. I don’t really have to word to describe it atm, but for now lets just call it “concentration”.

So, after my initial horror of finding out that WordPress has smilies on by default, and frantically searching through the admin area for the “off” button, it would appear that such an option was included. A search on Google didn’t get me what I was hoping for, but something close enough. A user was looking for a way to limit to the number of smilies allowed per comment, and something about vars.php was mentioned. A few clicks later and I had that opened up, found a chuck of what smilies and the path for their images, commented out the whole chuck, and it worked :D.

After migrating my few, old posts from Blogspot, and was about to compose my first post, I noticed a feature lacking that I failed to notice previously, the lack of a spell checker. This maybe insignificant for most, especially for a good portion of the local bloggers here, but I do make an effort to make sure I eliminate most of my typographic errors. Did some searching around found that the only version(s) of WordPress with the feature is the nightly CVS builds, so yep, thats what I’m running on now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t check for grammatical errors as well as Blogspot’s, but I’d have to make do with it for the moment being.

More to come tomorrow… or today!

EDIT: It seems that with this version 2.1alpha3, the option of turning the smilies off is available!

I terminated my web host recently due to not having any practical use for about 2 months. A few days later, Murphy’s law striked. A bug report which I was submitting required me to host system/debugging information somewhere and as a result, I had to settle with one of those free solutions from freewebs.com

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