With the current theme, not only is it a responsive design (meaning it will generally look good on any device) but it has a very modern and uncluttered look to it in general.   You will note on the home page itself, if you have been there of course, that aside from the menu along the top, all the other functions and things that are displayed aside from content has been moved to the bottom.  Again, that was a choice and something of the nature of what I was looking for in current version of things.  Once you click on an individual post or page, you do get more of a classic look that includes a sidebar with a few options.  Those of course are pretty slim now and there is a possibility of that sidebar going away completely.  Needless to say there are still some minor things that need to be addressed and choices made in regards to the look of the theme overall.

The theme itself is just one of the changes going on with the blog.  Of the chief concern in the immediate future, aside from getting back to a more regular blogging schedule is the current endless list of both categories and tags.  Truth be told, both have gotten out of control and need to be cleaned up.  I have used categories more like I should have been using tags and tags, well I have just been crazy.  Look for some changes on both of those fronts in the very near future.  Along with that of course, will be an update to the menu that goes along with the categories.

Right now, I am still trying to decide of one menu or two would serve the site best.  I am open for opinions in that regard by the way.  I have not decided completely on how to handle categories – as I am having this constant debate within regarding should this be about 4 different really focused blogs or should I continue in the tradition I have always used here and let it me just where I talk about what I want to talk about regardless of topic?  I do know that some categories will collapse down and at least one new one will appear – DIY (Do It Yourself) – as I have so much to over in such a category and frankly, it is a very popular kind of blog topic to have these days anyway.  The debate of course really comes down to whether it should be one blog controlled by categories or one multi-site blog controlled by different sub-sites.  I have leaning toward the former by the way, but have seen advantages going either way.

The next big consideration is what to do with the posts over at two other blogs, which could fit in here and free up the domain cost and maybe drive a bit more traffic here.  One is my old medieval blog, which never fully developed the way I wanted it too anyway.  I would hate to just nix the posts and let them be forever gone, but the lack of posting on my part and having not developed as I had hoped has lead to a virtual dead space on the internet anyway.  If I went with the 2nd option in the above (concerning multi-site) the option is clear.  The same is somewhat true of the farm blog I have.  Really, most of my posting is about political stupid stuff going on in regards to farming.  Certainly the more direct farming and the political high-horse I get onto occasionally fit in fairly nicely.

Along those same lines, the one category that could be its on blog with ease (assuming I get back to posting regularly) would be the technology posts.  I am involved in that aspect up to my eyeballs and would have no problem posting in such a blog daily if I would only get busy.  It is then a bit easier to optimize specifically and perhaps attract enough funds to support it and my speak my mind blog, eh?  Such are things that I have to consider.

Another consideration is about archiving.  By that, I don’t mean the history of this blog as it is currently presented, though that too is open for consideration.  I mean, with this seemingly big set of changes I am looking toward, is it time to make a static copy of things to keep around for archive purposes and start anew going forward?  When you consider some of the technology that has been used and what is available now I wonder sometimes if that would not be a better option.  For instance, my first post, whether there was not anything else available or I was too hand coding concentric to realized it, have images and such linked by hand to a folder/file that are just coded into the post.  It works both then and now, but there is an extra folder I have to go grab anytime I make a big move in regards to hosting and such.  Similarly, I have used NextGen since shortly after that.  But it is kind of overkill and with the functions now built into the core of WordPress, I am not sure it is really needed.  Should I drop it?  If I want those old post to work, do I convert them to the built in media support?  Or do I just use the new stuff going forward and keep maintaining the NextGen plugins?  Any thoughts on this?

So, to that end, I am swapping themes yet again to one that is Responsive.  To me it only makes sense to get with the beginning of themes and build out from there that supports this new take on technology and to that end, I am working from the Twenty Twelve theme that was released in November of 2012 as the base line and customizing the theme from there as a child of it.

This process of creating my own unique look from a theme that was out there, updated, and maintained, is something I have been wanting to do for sometime now anyway.  Certainly, the Twenty Twelve theme has more than enough options to do pretty much anything I would like to do with a theme as a base and the ability to split off for customization as a child theme says I can pretty much do whatever it is I would like to do.

Granted, developing a theme is something I have been wanting to do for some time now and this is excuse to do just that.  However, I am fully aware that it is going to take a little bit of time to proceed with this process.  There are a number of things I want to do with and more than a couple of things that I need to ‘fix’ to support some the legacy things I have done in and to support old themes.  Hopefully, I will get the time pursue this and have things looking good in quick order.

For now, here is the first bit of the theme, as it currently stands in the works…  Enjoy and let me know any comments you have regarding either the theme or the process.  And a big shout out to http://zeaks.org/, some really good tutorials on child themes, themes in general, even Twenty Twelve.

Not my usual kind of thing, but there has been a LOT happening in the sporting world of late and I thought I would weigh in on some of it in one of my observing style posts of old, where in I just hit several somewhat connected topics under one post.  I think I am hitting almost all of it below – yep, I got college basketball, the Hall of Fame balloting for Cooperstown, college football, the NHL lockout being resolved, and a rant about fishing at the collegiate level.  I guess that does leave out NASCAR and horseracing, but if any of the above are your interest you are in look and if none are appealing check back later, as I am sure I will have something else in a few days.

College Football – Okay, we are past the BSC bowl championship and as was little surprise to me once I seen who was playing, Alabama won it again.  I was hoping for an interesting game, but I am not sure that Notre Dame was the right choice when it came down to it with that much prep time especially for Nick Sabine.  What I question though, is what other team would have been an appropriate choice once other teams lost and Alabama made it back in based on strength of schedule?   Texas A&M did beat them in a major upset, but that would have been two SEC teams again and I don’t think the general population is ready to go there again really soon.  Well, I will have to temper that just a little, because with four team entering a playoff, I can see an easy two SEC teams a lot of years getting in – unless there is a rule against that.  And unless they put them against each in the first round, there could be two SEC teams facing each other often enough for the title.

College Basketball – It is happening at the University of Kentucky as I suspected and wrote about several years back.  It has been a fortunate situation where hereto someone has always been back that by January somewhat take on the leadership mantle with the basketball program.  No so this year and it is truly a rebuilding year.  I still have a lot of friends, and heck, there are a lot of professional sports analyst that still give this team more coming together time and they could be a contender at some level come March.  I personally, hope they go far in March for the experience that will be gained when most of this current freshman class are back next year and there is a real chance to take it all home again.  There have definitely been sparks with this team that make you want to believe (for instance, the claw back and eventual close loss to Louisville, where they played well and showed a lot of promise) but then you have situations like last night.  You know, a Vandy team that should be having a hard time keeping being doubled down on points, that clawed its way back and less a really bad no call on a shot clock violation would have had a tie game or even the win (and you all know that no call was horrible).

Baseball Hall of Fame - Nobody got the required 75% of the votes this year and for like the 8th time no one goes in this year.  I see a lot of folks calling it wrong, suggesting that this folks deserve it for what they did on the field.  I say pooh to notion.  These are the folks that artificially got the stats they somehow think they earned and most of them have been caught red-handed or have admitted it.  The one or two that have not (Clemens comes to mind), well, that consider the character clause in the voting guidelines covers it more than well enough from my vantage point.  Maybe he did or maybe he did not use, but if you are hanging around and associating with the scum that is dealing it (that is clearly the truth) that you have character issues.  Look, there is no secret of my love of Pete – but here is how I see it.  What he did was well after his legendary play and hurt really only himself.  These guys cheated the game as well as themselves.  When Pete can get in (who currently, with his ban, has no chance) then maybe a couple of these yahoos can be voted in – but my biased opinion hopes not even if Pete were to get in based on his contributions as a player…

NHL Lockout - So the lockout is about to be ended, at least that is the indications though the players representatives have agreed and it is still up to the players to actually vote.  But now there is a plan to have a quick training session and follow that up with a super short abbreviated season of play.  Why bother?  Oh, I know, the owners think a small amount is better than nothing at all and so they were go on with the show.  Reality is that just about the time the play on the ice gets up to a decent level the short season will be over.   And further, because of this über short play there is a good chance of some teams slipping in that are not really deserving of such.  My opinion, the season is ruined, take the year off and start fresh next season…

** – Image is from promotional materials for Hall of Fame and Cooperstown Vacation Planning

I realize I forgot the rant about fishing, another time…

So, to be completely fair, the update went wrong because my SSID drive was starting to have some issues.  I did not realize that until after I had installed a couple of other distros from scratch and had similar problems with the installs loosing information a few days after doing an install.  That aside, I tried several different things.   Things tried included straight Debian, Arch, flavors of Ubuntu & Mint, among one or two others.

But kept coming back to I really like either Mint or Ubuntu because of the leading edge kind of tools available in both, especially when considering the ability to use PPA’s to add software that is not necessarily in the release set of software at the current time.  While doing this though, I already knew that I did not really care for the Unity interface.  I have used and liked Cinnamon in the past so I was strong leaning back that direction.  At the same time, I felt like going to Mint (which is based on Ubuntu) added an additional layer in between things that was not necessarily the best way to do things.

In the back of mine, I kept thinking the stripped down Xfce interface running straight of an Ubuntu release was something to consider.  After installing that distro I was surprised by both how small the footprint was and the CPU usage of the desktop interface.  I am more then pleased as things and happy with the software selections available to me now.

The one kind of odd thing that I realize, being a person that uses a lot of command line and hence a big part of the reason why a thin desktop is better for me than one that has a lot of feature rich bloat is that I am slowly heading back the way I use to do things.  As in, there was a time when I was command line everything, everyday, in and out.  I of course, realize I am not that hard core and that the modern world requires two things on my part that will effectively have me using some sort of desktop for the foreseeable future:  namely the need for remote desktop services into windows servers that I support and especially the modern day browser and all that is offered from the internet/cloud via such.

• Finish my boat project and get it on the water.  I have had it over a year, actually closer to a year and a half and progress needs to be made toward actually fishing with it this summer.
• Blog more consistently and just more.  It goes without saying that 2012 (and even the last half 2011) has been on the worst periods as for blogging since I have had any of the blogs up and active.
• Get some sort of order back on my multiple desks and maintain it -  the several at the office and especially the one at home.  The maintaining part is the thing I did not do so well on last year.
• Similarly, I need to keep the kitchen counter and the table cleared off – this one is nearly there, but I need to help my wife with this one as well.  There is also one little corner that I tend to pileup on the coffee table/cedar chest that needs to stop happening.
• Lose weight, or should that say some more weight.  I lost some in 2012, than gained, followed  by more loss, and ended up just a few pounds below where I started the year.  I need to get it back going big time.
• Along with the above I need to get in better shape, which has been more then a little difficult with the balance issues from the MS, that I have especially when I get warm, like when working out.
• Both of the above can of course be helped with eating better.  Over all in 2012 I did pretty good with this one, but there were times when I got off the bandwagon.  And especially the eating out does not help on this.  There are only a few place I feel like one can go out and eat healthy.  Much better to eat at home and in turn eat fresher and generally much better and healthier food.
• I would say go fishing more, but I think I probably did about as much fishing in 2012 as my wife will tolerate from me.  So lets leave it at fish the same amount, or what would it hurt for an extra trip or two?
• Would also like to get all my books and the last few tools and such put away from the last move, but alas, right now, we are considering the possibility of a move again in the near future.  So, I will hold off on that one to see which way we step first.  Regardless, once a move is made or the decision against moving, stuff needs to be put away.
• Watch less television actually should be at the top of this list, as that will facilitate so many of the other things.  I have about 5 prime times show I really like to watch and a few fishing shows I catch when they have something interesting or ‘teaching’ involved, but I have gotten into a bad habit of catching re-runs of loved shows and even just having the thing on when there really is no need for it.
• Save a boat load of money to be able to do an adoption either late this year or early next year.

Did you make any goals or resolutions?  Share them if there are any odd ones?  What about last years?  How did you measure up?

** – Image from blog.anthonycoletraining.com

A brief background to begin, I am the kind of person that does need some sort to listing to keep myself in order and on track with what needs to be done.  In days gone by, I have kept lists of things that needed to be done in either little notebooks, note cards, or even the back of unused punch cards.  That works only so well, especially in this more modern-day of have so much of the things needed to be done related to electronic items, where keeping a URL or some such is especially handy.  After having tried many different things in the past I had kind of settled on using a simple ASCII text-based simple flat file system, where in things were put in order on a daily basis and removed to a done file when completed.  This works, but it necessarily requires a good bit of effort to keep it all up to date and working smoothly.

As mentioned already, sometime during the late summer I was on the look for something else, trying many different todo type of list managers.  During this time someone suggested DoIt.im.  The application is great, especially on the mobile platforms.  I really like the way it collects anything into your list at the inbox.  From there you can easily assign dates and put it various groups or lists.  Add the awesome tagging to put in groups and I was sold.  The one drawback – no native Linux support. In fact, there was one at some point, but it was very limited on the Linux platform.  Very recently though, indication on the support website the promised Linux version as axed.  Not a big problem for me, as I had used the web-based client just fine.  However, the DoIt folks that started a limit on the synch function to my mobile devices, unless I pay a $2.00 a month subscription.  Off to looking again.

Timely enough, I happened across someone on one of the Linux forums about a native todo list tool called Nitro.  I have given a whirl and so far I am fairly pleased.  I have the native in Linux which is kind of cool and I get all the synchronisation that I want for free (using a Dropbox files in a folder).  I guess my only two minor complaints are the like a true mobile platform, forcing me to use the web for check on my iPad or phone.  Additionally, by doing the synch through Dropbox, if I am using it on my laptop and forget to force a synch before jumping on my desktop I get out of synch issues.  Both are minor, but it would be easy enough to fix both of the issues.

Bottom line, I would probably stick with DoIt, but the $2.00 and like of native Linux really bugs me.  I think with the open source nature of the Nitro, I figure getting the mobile platforms there will pretty soon.  Anyone else have an opinion between the two or even a different suggestion?

It has been so long now since I left Lunar Pages I do not recall the exact reasoning.  I know part of it was some outages that never seemed to be acknowledged by the LP folks, always blaming it on outages with the internet between me and the hosting site.  The other thing was the higher price structure to achieve what was an affiliate payout structure.  My conversion rate was always just high enough to keep my interested, but never really high enough to make a dent in my hosting fees, especially when compared to what I could achieve in lower price hosting solutions at other places doing hosting up in the cloud.

So, I jumped to Linode.  Absolutely no complaints on the service that is offered, especially for the price.  It is a true VPS with total control of the server that you set up and install.  Of course, with total control comes total maintenance of the server.  While I loved being able to use the server to do testing and such for any project I was interested in, it was an almost constant effort to keep all the patches up to date and close the latest discovered exploit that could make the system vulnerable.  That really started to get old and was to close to overlapping my day job, so something had to give.

I did look into a lot of potential options, even briefly considered going to be Lunar Pages and for short month or two, while still figuring things out retried Host Gator as a temporary stop despite my previous bad experience with them.  Then, almost as timely as could be, somewhere on some forum (maybe Reddit?) I read regularly someone mentioned Gandi.net.  Turns out the company seems to be based on France, but has a pretty sizeable operation in the good old USA.  They are much more than just hosting, offering Domain Registration first and foremost, along with several other services.  However, the VPS hosting was at a price point that made sense for me and extensive searching really did not find much out there that complained about the services they offered.  Been with them going on two months now and really no complaints at this point.  I do think I may need to bump up the memory in my package if I get traffic built out like I had this time two years ago, but at the cost bump that would not be a big deal to do.  I highly recommend them and for a change I do not get a kickback for doing so.

** – Image is Gandi.net logo.

My first point of contention was that if you go back a full twenty-five years, it really becomes a toss-up with what Bill Gates and Microsoft accomplished in the late 1980′s into the 1990′s when compared to what Jobs did with Apple in the 2000′s.  Think about it, by the end of the 90′s nearly everyone was trying to get an edge in on the big behemoth of Microsoft.  Everyone who was anyone in the technology world was either in court with them or being bought up by them.  Apple was in that same earlier period with Jobs for part of it and struggling to put it mildly in some years.  In those days, based on a few happy things Bill Gates definitely shaped the computer world much more Jobs.  Get to the around 2001 and that begins to change certainly Jobs has had more influence in the last ten years, much to Gates’ and Microsoft’s chagrin.

But that really gives a huge emphasis on the effects that technology plays, and while that does have impacts to a large part of the world, there is a good size of the world that is just now starting to get on that first and second rung of technology ladder.  I personally think that probably George W. Bush has probably had more influence on the world at large then either Jobs or Gates, especially if you are looking at a some comparison that is just around a decade or so long.  Think about it, 9/11 falls just barely outside of the 10 year mark, but even if you had a hard cut-off, the fallout from that is still going now in 2012.  Iraq has supposedly been all taken care of, but even last week it was still in the news and Afghanistan is at least for two more years.  But it is much bigger then even those two countries.  The whole Middle East situation seems to reach a thunderous crescendo every few months and for better or worse some of that has a direct influence from policies and practices implemented and enforced under Bush.

It was then that I realized, though deceased now, perhaps the most influence on a world level held by anyone in the last twenty or so years might very well be Osama Bin Laden.  I realize, probably a slightly less liked person that even Bush by especially more Americans, but just think on it a bit.  Huge involvement in so many things that has effected the world as a whole.  Sure, Bush did things after 9/11, but it was the lead of Osama that prompted those moves on Bush’s part even then.  In some ways, yes, he and Bush were dance partners, but Osama was the lead partner and certainly had much more involvement on the world stage before Bush was even Governor of Texas.

With interest and reflection from that perspective, I realized that probably the largest influence of the last century, for better and especially worse,  probably resides with Hitler.  What do you all think?

** – Image is common of Steve Jobs, maybe from Apple advertisement?

It is a toss-up between the theme change and the limited advertising as to which of the changes are the most noticed when you first get here.  Let me touch on the theme first.  The old theme had limited support at best, was a little on the dark side, despite have a dark text on the light background that seems to be the preferred, and quite frankly was little heavy with older features, while not up to supporting the new features in the latest few versions of WordPress.  The new theme is super light for both load times and overall feel when you get the first front page of the blog.  It does a better job of presenting the last few post that have appeared on here in a very nice and concise way without really feeling the need to pull in a flashing picture scroll or something of that nature.  By doing that, it allowed one more piece of the widget area to be dropped.  Combine that with dropping the links widget (which who really uses that these days anyway?) the whole side bar got a LOT of cleaning up.

Add to that the dropping of the blinking and sometimes animating advertising blocks that were only on rare occasion getting any clicks, much less much in the way of conversion and the blog becomes a much cleaner less distracting experience.  You dear readers and users can now do what you and I both want, which is read with minimum interference and distraction.  I did leave the Google Adsense area, but only as text, so distractions are at a minimal amount and what does show up seems to more likely be related to what you are reading in the posts anyway.   That is also, where the small amount of conversion actually comes from and does help in a small way to support keeping the blog up and running.

As mentioned, one of the other big changes, that you are likely on seeing from a mobile device, was the return of support for mobile devices.  I have done limited testing with it, but the module is the one included in the JetPack plugin.  It does seem to do a good job of what is advertised, giving a slightly stripped down but very readable version of the blog on multiple mobile platforms.  Coming included in JetPack means it likely going to have a pretty good support as new mobile types of platforms come along.

Another thing that I have done, because of support in a different JetPack module is revert back to the normal comment system that is included in WordPress.  The biggest reason I went to and tried things like Discus and LiveFyre was the support they offered for allowing logins with both Twitter and Facebook.  It seems like both added a pretty good amount of overhead, did not detect spam comments as well as Akismet is able to do, and generally left me feeling like I no longer ‘owned’ or ‘controlled’ my comments (I know that is not the case, but it was the feeling all the same).

Bottom line, all changes that I think are for the better.  Take a look around yourself and see what you think.  And by all means, drop a comment or something letting me your thoughts and opinions on these changes and anything else we can do to make for a better user experience.

 ** – Image from the web, but indicated in Public Domain.

** – Image is ‘badge’ for NaBloPoMo 2012.