Author: Cupcakey

Well, I finally finished the new theme for atourworst.org. It’s not a design that I created, but rather I ported it from styleshout.com‘s design: Refresh. As you can see I kept a lot of the elements the same, as I really liked the overall design. I changed around a few things, like the icons (from famfamfam.com) and obviously it has support for WordPress [2.x].

Some of the plugins it currently supports: Brian’s Latest Comments, Dunstan Style Error Page, My Del.icio.us, Now Reading, Simple Tagging, SRG Clean Archives, Vipers Plugins Used, Word Count, and WP-Postviews.

The following are aesthetic elements that the theme supports: CSS Speech Bubbles, CSS Drop Shadows, and Lightbox JS.

There are obviously other plugins I use here at this site, but those aren’t ones that need to be integrated in order to perform. There might be some quirks throughout the site, so please bare with me while I try to sort them out. I’m also [finally] going to update some of the pages, as they haven’t been formatted to fit with this layout or new stylesheets that have been added. Also, the only bug that I know of thus far, is when viewing a child page (subpage) the subpage listing disappears. I’m working on getting it to stay visible, so you’ll have to love the back button for now.

One of my favorite new features (from a plugin) has been the Dunstan Style Error Page which sets up a 404 page with proper information to help out a visitor if they’ve accessed a page from my domain, that is no longer set up. Try it out for yourself.

I’ve finally been working on a new layout to put up here. Now before you think that I’ve gone designer and actually did something on my own, you’re crazy. I ended up porting over a design from another website, to work with WordPress. But it’s given me a chance to play around with it, and it’ll contain a lot of features and functions that I’ve been needing to have for awhile. Eventually once I learn a bit more about various functions and elements, I’ll go ahead and release it as a public theme. For now it’ll just be my little play thing.

Ended up registering for a class to take over the summer. It’s just a CIS (Computer Information Systems) class that’ll be on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5-9:55pm, that starts on May 15th. I’m going to see what other classes are available to take over the summer, since most of them have about 2-3 spots left before their filled up.

I wish I had grenades. One of the neighbors has their music up so loud that I can feel that bass from it. It’s starting to annoy the crap out of me because it’s an odd sound compared to the other noises around here. I should go knock out their power.

edit: I ended up going outside on the deck to see if I could hear exactly where it was coming from and it ended up being a band that was practicing (very poorly if you ask me) a few houses behind us.

Might order some business cards from Moo.com for Holdfire Network.

A month or more ago I came across a website, Reinvigorate.net. At that point all I knew was that it was another analytic stats program that was currently in beta testing. Eager to try out anything stats related, I went ahead and put in my e-mail address to try to get my hands on a beta invite. More teasing ensued when I read “Reinvigorate Preview”, an article from Dev Lounge.

Well, I ended up forgetting about it up until I got an e-mail on the 12th, with the subject Reinvigorate // Private Beta, and the first line saying: You have been invited to join the Reinvigorate private beta.” Obviously much girly squealing ensued, and I gushed to Mark about how I’d been waiting to hop on it.

Reinvigorate Your Stats

Being a Mint user, I’ve been introduced (and obsessed?) with stats that are crucial to my site, even if it’s not something that I can actually benefit from. The first thing I see, is a very smooth and sleek design. Color scheme: check, browser compatibility: check, pretty images that show off stats’ features: check check.

The big difference between Mint and Reinvigorate is that it’s not a hosted script. It’s all stored over at Reinvigorate’s panel. All I have to do is insert the javascript snippets into my header and I’m all good to go. I won’t have to worry about updating it, or taking up another MySQL database (or well, whatever platform RE is off of). The main disadvantage I could see happening is that their site goes down for good, and I’ve no longer got my own hosted option, or their site is down and isn’t tracking. It’s hosted by Media Temple so I’m really hoping that the uptime will be as close to 100% as it can get (taking into account maintenance, etc.)

But so far I’ve been having a lot of fun with it, and it’s really been amazing thus far. Some of the graphs that are available, like the hourly visits. I can see a linear graph of it, or polynomials. There’s even a graph for hourly distributions. I don’t have to add any extra peppers, or wait for another pepper to be developed. Another favorite feature of mine, is definitely the Geolocation (which uses googlemaps to pin point users) and the Time Zone, which according to RI thus far, the more popular timezone that my visitors live in seem to be CST.

I love Mint, but considering I don’t have to pay $30 (so far), I’m going to stick with using Reinvigorate for any other site I develop. I’ve already stuck it on Holdfire.net, Stylevirb.com and when I remember, Virbtastic.com.

Bare with the site at the moment. I’m currently redoing various elements, so if you see any errors, send me a message.