bogd

Something about sunscreen.

2008-07-30T05:00:00.003-05:00

I started thinking about a time when a friend and I had one of those discussions about life. I often think back to prior discussions or events when I can't sleep. This is one of those nights. We ended up talking about high school, and how ignorant we were. How we thought we knew everything. How we were at the cusp of a world much larger than the little city we grew up in. We also talked about how we would smack ourselves for being so naive.

I also remember a question, one that gets asked whenever high school is mentioned. I was asked if I could, would I change anything. I find it a bit silly to ask that because none of us have flux capacitors hooked up to our cars, but I answered it anyways.

I would take more photos.

I think that's the one regret I have. I didn't take enough photos. I realized this early on. When asked by a friend, who was beginning their senior year (this was shortly after I graduated), if I had any advice, I told them that no matter how dumb it may seem, take a photo. Take a lot of photos.

This is a lot easier to do now since we live in the age of the cheap digital camera. Back in my day, taking photos seemed like a bit of a chore. Now the cameras are in our cell phones, and the quality isn't as bad as it use to be.

Anyone who is checking out my flickr account will see that I posted a few photos of my friends and I hanging out. It's nothing breathtaking. I recently rediscovered my old motto, and I hope I don't forget it again.

How I export iTunes playlists.

2008-06-10T19:16:00.005-05:00

Lately, I've been playing around with different Operating Systems on the new PC I built back in April. At first, I installed Mac OS X Leopard. I then tried to set up the machine to triple boot to either Vista or Ubuntu. That didn't work out all too well, and now I'm back on Vista. Since I'm now running the sucker on, "Next-Gen," hardware (PCI Express, Core 2 Duo, SATA, and RAM that isn't old) it's not slow like it was on the Pentium 4 machine. Leopard ran like a fluid dream on my set-up, though.

Anyways, the problem I've been running into is re creating all of those playlists I've made in iTunes. If there is a way to export all of that data, back it up, and import it later, I'm not sure. Color me stupid.

My music collection is small. It's roughly 23GB, and it's centralized onto a back-up drive. Meaning that, I update my library on the main computer, then back it up to the external drive nightly. When I transfer to a new computer or repair an old one, the music that resides on the machine gets trashed and replaced with the constantly backed-up/updated library from the external hard drive. It's easier to transfer tunes to other machines without having to deal with networking.

My solution around the playlist problem is to add the title of the playlist to the song's information in the, "Grouping," text field.

An example would be, say, I have a small playlist (which most of mine are) made up of songs that I have put together to go with a story I'm writing. Let's call this story, "Giants." So, in each song that I have in the playlist, I add the word, "Giants," into the Grouping text field. When I transfer my tunes to a new or repaired PC, I create a smart playlist in iTunes that goes like this, "Grouping contains Giants," and a new playlist is made of those songs that have been tagged.

Since my playlists are small, and the track order has been the same for years, it's easy to remember what song goes where. This small solutions prevents the need to re add all the songs to a new playlist.

Now, this isn't the best solution. It might be the stupidest. This is something I started doing recently, and it prevents me from having to Google playlist exporters.

My Muxtape!

2008-04-05T12:32:00.006-05:00

Muxtape is a recently launched service that lets you create mix tapes and share them online. Browsing through, you'll see a lot of interesting combinations, and some really ace mixes.

BUT!

I can see it being a cesspool of lawsuits once the RIAA gets wind of it, if they haven't already. I was going to create a Muxtape from a playlist I put together. I logged in to start the uploading process when I noticed this.

By uploading a song you agree that you have permission to let Muxtape use it.

Yes, I, Ben Taylor, have the authority to grant Muxtape permission to host and stream a song by The Cure. I kid!

So, to avoid a friendly cease-and-desist letter from my favorite bands, I'm just going to list the songs I would of uploaded to Muxtape, and you use whatever illegal means necessary to download the tunes.

Tunes!
1.Introduction - Voxtrot
2.Tonight, Tonight - Smashing Pumpkins
3.They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh! - Sufjan Stevens
4. No I In Threesome - Interpol
5. Such A Scene - The Changes
6. The Pioneers - Bloc Party
7. Suture Up Your Future - Queens of the Stone Age
8. Big Chair - Travis
9. Adonais - The Cure
10. Beware - Deftones
11. All I Need - Radiohead

Runtime: 45.8 minutes of awesome music that you could probably shag to.

Apple. Whatever you're doing it's working!

2008-03-25T18:14:00.005-05:00

So, Apple is sneaking Safari 3.1 onto people's computers while they're not looking. It has upset this dude. I haven't really given it much thought. Safari is a nice browser.

I do my hourly checking of Pownce to see this message from a long time friend, Kristin.

Do you still use macs? Some how I downloaded safari the other day. I think when I had to upgrade itunes or something. Anyways, I really like it. Do you use Sarfari? I am really thinking about getting a mac in the future. What do you think?

Oh, now I see why they're doing it.

I responded to her question with the following.

Tool!

Not really, I think it was a private convo. Can't remember, but my Macs are boxed up. The iBook G3 was from a batch of iBooks that came with faulty logic boards, and the iMac G5 w/ iSight's USB board took a dive.

Hell has a special place for Internet Explorer.

2008-03-12T23:29:00.010-05:00

I've spent the past few days coding what I hope will become the default theme for Pez. If not, it can always be downloaded later. As a web developer, I remember the, "easy," days (right after Netscape failed) when you only had to design/code for one browser. Then the Firefox builds started gaining traction, and it was common to have two browsers opened. It was also common to have one browser render the HTML differently than the other.

Fast forward to now, where it's pretty common to have four browser windows open, and they all have their own interpretation of the code. Today I had Firefox 3 Beta 4, Flock 1.1, Internet Explorer 7 (can't install IE8 Beta 1 because I'm running Vista SP1 Beta), and Safari 3 going. In the beginning of the, "HTML format fixes," FF3b4 and Safari rendered the page the same way, Flock had it's own version, and IE 7 was way off. The stuff I was doing was probably too advanced for it.

After some tweaking, the Firefox based browsers were in sync, Safari placed the profile picture a little too high, and IE thought the profile photo should be at the bottom of the page, and the header should ignore all margins and padding.

Well, after 10 more minutes of tweaking, the profile page looks the same in every browser except for IE7, where the header is the only thing still jacked because it's anti-margin/padding!

Do you have to be an Atheist about it? My God, man!

Stuff like this makes me want to put on a superhero suit, and install Firefox on people's computer while they sleep.

Or maybe I should just help push for better web standards?

Dropping support for IE all together sounds like my cup of tea, but you can't out the market leader. Doing so makes you look like a pretentious a-hole. People don't like that.

Pez. Let's talk about it.

2008-03-09T00:44:00.011-06:00

Since Lee has been dropping all sorts of mentions about Pez on his personal blog (it's getting bigger in his tag cloud). I think it's about time I go into detail about it, and stop dropping hints like I did in my last post.

So, what is Pez? Well, we all know it's a candy that come in those cool dispensers shaped like your favorite talk show host (or cartoon character) that I used to collect when I was younger, and my ex-girlfriend's mom use to buy me a lot of because she thought it was cute (Glad I didn't tell her I liked Star Wars).

The Pez I'm talking about it an open-source project that is being developed by Lee Kelleher and myself. Pez , "provides a simple homepage profile for people who use many external websites and want to aggregate them all in one place."

How Pez works:

The wordy version for people who like to read.
Pez takes the RSS feeds from the different services that you use (like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, last.fm, and some sort of blog) and puts them into a nice profile page on your own dot com to give your visitors a snapshot of what you're doing online. It acts as a lazy homepage and identity site. You don't have to update it because it updates itself.

You can either use the full blown installation of Pez (in a sub directory of yours, and using a theme), or you can add bits and parts of it to your site. Example of using bits and parts? The main page to bogd looks really bland right now. Once we get more added to Pez, it will display my recent blog posts. My about page (which is running Personal Zeitgeist) will include my photos from flickr, and data streams from other sites.

Graphical representation for people who like pictures of wizards.

We're aiming to make Pez a lightweight and easy install.

Giving credit where credit is due. (We believe in good coding karma)
Pez is an open-source project based on Personal Zeitgeist by Matthew Hockenberry from Creative Synthesis, which is built on SimplePie. It's the foundation we're using to build Pez.

Changes we've made (so far)
As of this writing, Pez is currently in its sixth revision. You can see it running here. As you can see, all we have to do is add some blue, and it will be a friendfeed. ;)
- Added module for your last.fm feed. (Plan to add other modules for other things like events.)
- Added links to other profiles you may have online.
- Rearranged the code into subfolders to make it neater.
- Updated to the new version of SimplePie.
- Created an admin. page.
- Started to include support for Gravatar.
- jQuery (You can read about Lee's adventure with it here.)

We have a road map posted at the Google Code page, so you can see where we're going with this. A lot of progress has been made in the two weeks (as of this writing) we've been working on this.

It's great to be working with Lee again. Last time we got together, we were like rock stars who got free swag, and lots of e-mail from people. Lee ended up in the L.A. Daily News. The man is on fire. While most people are reading about how to get things done, Lee is just doing it. He's a new father, a business owner, and he's making the back-end magic for Pez happen. I'm the front-end dude. I'm making the graphics and working on the themes.

How Pez will handle themes.
We're taking the css Zen Garden approach, where you just swap out the CSS file to change your theme. No need to update the index file. Once we get a theme down that we like, you CSS junkies can make as many themes as you want, and we'll add them to a directory. (When we set that up)

This is all I have for now. I must get back to coding.

Pownce. I like.

2008-03-06T07:58:00.002-06:00

I've been trying to find some way to spam my friends with images I find nifty, or links I think are just too awesome to hold onto for myself. I had the idea of using my Tumblr for that very reason, but it just never happened. We went out for a few drinks, but the magic just wasn't there. Sorry. I might finally merge this here blog over to Tumblr, but I'm holding out for a few more features. It's also neat that it can import my personal feeds from other sites, but I'm holding out for something a little more to my liking. (Pez!)

I've been using Facebook, but that doesn't give me the public access I need. I need it, man. I need those search hits!

But I think I found my way to spam the people on my social graph, or whatever buzzword the masses can think of to describe my real friends and online acquaintances.

Pownce.

I got an invite to Pownce while it was still in Beta. (That's how I roll) I saw no need for it. Just another thing I could sign up for that could help get me to the front page of a Google search for my name. Then, I started to find these little things I wanted to share, things that I couldn't fit a few paragraphs around (like I'm doing here). I started to see the, "need," for something like Pownce.

What about Twitter?

What about it? I have one of those, but I don't use it. Sure, I can post links to photos or Youtube videos, but Pownce gives me thumbnails, which I like. Well, this shouldn't really be a Twitter vs Pownce debacle. Both are different service.

?

Well, Twitter asks, "What are you doing?" While Pownce is all like, "Send stuff to your friends," (Yes, they talk to me.) Both are microblogging services, yes. But with different...goals?...targets? I don't know, I said this wasn't going to be a Twitter vs. Pownce write up.

We could also argue that I could us IM instead. Well, have fun playing IM protocol tag. I could FTP stuff, but explain FTP to your mom. Yes, good luck. I know all about the other things I can do to send people stuff. I like using Pownce. Where else can I pick an ugly wood panel theme? (I like the green).

I will give you the link so you can acquaintance me (my actual friends, the ones I can touch, are still floored by the fact that you can get on the internet on your Wii, so throwing this whole, "Pownce" concept at them might be too much, too soon.).

The stuff I post is public, so there is no need to sign up for an account. If you want to spam me back or leave comments, you might want to get you one.

Ben Taylor's Spam Factory (Pownce)

GrandCentral: Protecting you from the crazies.

2008-02-27T13:57:00.004-06:00

I recently signed up for this new Google service called GrandCentral. It gives you one phone number that rings all of your phones. So, it masks your real phone number. Basically, girls can leave a bar with a clean conscious. They didn't give their, "actual," number away, but they can still be reached. Follow me? No? Good.

This is something I wish I had when I was transitioning between three phone numbers last year. Even though that ordeal is over with, I still signed up. I can see something like this coming in handy when I'm out and about in the dating world. There are a lot of crazy women out there who claim they've deleted your number, and they will never call you again, then call every day after that from different numbers. To save everyone time, all I have to do is deactivate my cell phone from the GrandCentral phone number, and I'll never be bothered again.

You can find your own reasons to use GrandCentral. I'm sure they're a million of them. Since the service is backed by Google, you don't have to worry about it shutting down, since Google has found a way to print paper money using solar-energy.

Now with comments!

2008-02-15T12:45:00.003-06:00

Since I've been posting more...frequently, and I'm yammering about things that could be open for conversation, I decided to grant you readers with the ability to leave comments. Before, I felt the stuff I was spamming your feed reader with were things that, like, I dunno, didn't really warrant the need to leave your thoughts too.

Well, now you can. Welcome to 1999!

Also, I'm playing around with the idea of sharing audio with you folks, and how I can go about doing it. Plugging the feed into iTunes so you automatically (or with your permission of course) get that tune I think is the bee's knees.

OUT!

Anyone can play guitar and make widgets.

2008-02-12T19:52:00.004-06:00

While waiting for his baby to magically appear (I still don't know where those "things," come from) Lee Kelleher has been updating his blog and playing around on the internet. Lee made a blog post talking about a Mozilla project called Prism. Said post reminded me that I had installed it a while ago, and I haven't tried using it since because it told me that there was no program, only XUL error.

So, I reinstalled it. Now it works.

Mozilla's Prism takes those fancy web sites (or web apps), and lets them run in their own stand-alone window. Lee does a better job explaining what it does, and what he uses it for.

But I found a different use for it.

Prism+iPhone facebook site/Wizardry=Widgets!

Widget/Gadget, whatever. It's basically a small application that runs on your desktop, and just about gives you full access to a sexier version of facebook.

It's neat. Digsby notifies me when something happens on facebook, so I move my mouse over to the "facebook mini," window and check it out. No need to search through tabs, or wait for the monster that is Flock (it's built on Firefox) to respond. There are other pros, and even cons, but I'll let the, "Everything has to be in one window," kiddies argue that for you.

Now, most, but not all, sites have a mobile/iPhone formatted version, so you may check it while you're in the bathroom. Once you have Prism installed, run the the program to turn your favorite website into a, "program." Also remember to create a shortcut so you won't have to go through the set up process again and again.

...and again.

Remember to resize the window so it looks right, and not stretched out.

Name of Site - URL - (mobile version)

Note! Standard Mobile versions are dull and boring.

facebook - http://iphone.facebook.com - (iPhone)
Gmail - http://m.gmail.com - (Standard Mobile)
Google Reader -http://www.google.com/reader/m - (Standard Mobile)
Google Reader - http://www.google/reader/wii - (Wii Edition)
iGoogle - http://www.google.com/ig/i - (iPhone)
iGoogle - http://www.google.com/m - (Standard Mobile)

Oh, you get to set an icon for your new, "program," or you can use the standard globe icon, whatever. I spent hours making a desktop icon for my "facebook mini," Prism app, and I'm making it available for you to download. You have three to choose from (256x256), and you can find them here.

Enjoy.

Always late to the party.

2008-02-01T12:50:00.001-06:00

I want to take the time to welcome David Troupes' Buttercup Festival back to the online world. It was greatly missed.

The series was first brought to my attention back in 2003 when I was conversing with Bob Krzykowski (of Elsie Hooper fame). I was instantly drawn (hehe pun) to Buttercup Festival's art style. Simple looking characters on a detailed backdrop. The style takes me back to when I was a child. In those days, I was probably the only kid who was a Calvin and Hobbes fan, and Bill Watterson fan. Drawing his characters were easy. They looked a bit different because of one's artistic style, but have fun trying to draw Watterson's trees.

In 2005 Troupes (then going by the pseudonym Elliott G. Garbauskas) put the strip to bed, and three years later, it makes its surprise return.

The sad thing? Series like Buttercup Festival and Elsie Hooper reminds me of the sorry state the Sunday's comics section is in. It was recently cut down to four pages (from eight), and it's pretty sad that the best strip in the section is a rerun of a classic (read: Peanuts). Garfield isn't funny unless you remove his thought bubbles (You see how sorry Jon Arbuckle is, not the strip itself). Family Circus is just sitting there waiting to suck. Non Sequitur and Zits are the only things it has going for it.

Luckily, God made the internet on the eighth day, which enables me to roll my own section. Here is a list of the others I read. Some are no longer updated.

Ballad
Creased Comics
dinosaur comics
Penny Arcade
The Perry Bible Fellowship
Sh*thouse
Skinny Panda
xkcd

The Intelligent Artificials #1

2008-01-29T18:25:00.001-06:00

This is something I sketched out during my day off.

The Intelligent Artificials follows a bunch of electronic devices as they carry out our mundane day to day life after our civilization dies out. I'll do a few more before I decided to take this up part time, and dedicate a page to it.

This is one of several illustrated stories/comics I have floating in my head, so I want to see which one sticks first.

Click to enlarge!

Main Site Go!

2008-01-28T01:07:00.002-06:00

The main page to this site has been added.

http://www.bogdind.com

No, it's not a recolored version of what I had up at http://www.thebentaylor.com

(Ok, it is)

So, why the change, why should you care? Because 2008 is the year of Ben Taylor. Don't believe me? Check your Chinese calendar.

I felt it to be a bit narcissistic to have a site about me with my name in the domain. I mean, I love myself, but not enough. It also seems to be the thing to do now, and people are snatching up domain names with their name in it like crazy.

I'm a trend setter, and not a follower.

I just had to make the switch. I also thought it would be pointless to have a personal site, and another site for my projects that I want to work on. That's like, two main pages, and two blogs, man. That's insane. I need a staff of eight for that.

So here it is, an event six years in the making. bogd version 7. Now called bogd independent cause I have no funding, and this whole get-up cost $7 USD.

This is the place you will have to go to, to find out about the short story I'm writing (it deals with one man's online obsession, addiction, and his personal crusade.) The video project I may get around to doing, and my photo projects I would do if I could find my camera.

Oh, and BTW. I think my camera was stolen. Tripod and all. I last saw it in my car, and now I can't seem to find it anywhere. It was probably done by the same bastard who is trying to reset my Windows Live password. If it was stolen, I would like to thank the thief for locking the car door on your way out, and not snatching my Zune too.

Oh, and launch party invites are going out soon on Facebook.

Sike.

Oh. Does He?

2008-01-23T00:39:00.000-06:00

The following scan was taken from The Destin Log. I'm sorry. My mind is totally in the gutter, and I laughed when I first saw this. I couldn't write a better title.

For the record. I do not suck. Thank You.

2008-01-21T02:29:00.000-06:00

First up. Hello, welcome to the new domain. The RSS feed remains the same. No need to update. You can check out the site at http://blog.bogdind.com. The main site hasn't been set up yet.

Second. A little while ago, flickr introduced a new service for Pro members that gives them stats about their photos. Like, where they gone. Where they been. Back in November, I had someone take a photo of me sporting an awesome vest. Well, that photo is being used on a site cleverly titled, "Ben Taylor Sucks."

Even though the site refers to the football player of the same name, I have my crack team of cyber geeks locating the owner of the URL, and my lawyers are sharping their teeth.

Headache.

2007-10-14T12:04:00.000-05:00

That's one word to describe most applications for the Facebook Platform.

I'll be short and get right to the point.

Before the semester began, Facebook removed their version of the Courses feature and turned it over to the developer community. So, instead of one, universal app that everyone has to use, I have to play a game of Where's Waldo? and pick from several apps and hope that everyone in my class uses the same one.

Anyone else see a problem?

Oh, and he's hiding behind the slide.

onedotone halos

2007-09-15T00:19:00.000-05:00

A note.

The color scheme you're looking at was unintentionally inspired by the video game Halo 3. I guess I got wrapped up in all of the hype that's been going around lately. I just finished pounding the special edition Mountain Dew, and I noticed that the new color scheme was a bit Master Chiefy.

This color palette is based off of Confused by artsykerley.

It's time to prepare myself for the onslaught of racial slurs that will be thrown at me while I'm pwning n00bs online. I will leave you with one man's tale of name calling while playing the halos.

Jeff Doak is on notice.

2007-09-03T12:35:00.000-05:00

I was browsing my Google Analytic results for this here blog, when I stumbled acrossed a referral that came from an IP address that looked something like this.

/~jdoak/converseon/eresponder.php

and

/~jdoak/converseon/showurl.php

So, naturally, this left me a bit confused, and little interested in knowing who this jdoak was. Maybe this person was really named Jessica Doak, and she was the woman of my dreams, and she was desperatly trying to get a hold of me. That was wishful thinking. I wanted to Nancy Grace this "ish" and get answers, so I turned to Google. Deep Thought.

I saw that someone at LucasArts has the user name of jdoak and that got me really excited. I mean, here I am thinking that Jessica worked for THE MAN, and that I was going to move to California, and get to work with the guy who plays Hiro Nakamura on NBC's Heroes (season 2 starts 9-24-07), and develop neat things for ILM, but I realized that I don't posses that knowledge yet, so I would just live off Jessica's pay check and buy shoes.

Then I stumbled on this link to a blog post by Aubrey Turner, who had the same IP address and URL pop up in their site traffic data. I then learned that jdoak was not a Jessica, but a Jeff. That made me a sad panda. As you can see from the comment left by Jeff Doak, he apparently works for a company called Converseon that tracks blogs and other media to see what they are saying about their clients (Hilton, The Hilton Family, Dow, Hitachi, PayPal, and lots more.).

Man, oh man. So, I either just randomly popped up, or someone has some interest as to what I'm saying. In reality, and compared to other people, I am a nobody. Like, what company wants to know what I'm saying?

But if a company wants a glowing review about something, I have no problem writing it. I'm only human, so I do have a price tag. My price is a bit higher than others, but I'll say something nice about anyone.

I guess I can cancel the wedding invitation order I put in earlier today. Jessica isn't real. I jumped the gun on that one.

I've been Schmapped!

2007-09-01T22:26:00.000-05:00

It's not a big deal, and I won't become a big name because of it, but two of my photos from my Flickr page were picked by an editor for consideration to be included in Schmap's St. Louis city guide.

I had to give my blessing so the photos could be republished, then some wizardry happened, and I was notified today that my photos were included in the third edition of the guide. I didn't get paid for it, but it's nice to know that someone out there thinks my, "work," is worthy enough for something. I've had people pick my photos before to be used in news stories over at NowPublic.com.

Maybe I should be a photographer. Screw this whole computer nonsense.

To see the photos, they are here.

http://www.schmap.com/stlouis/tours_tour1/p=172743/i=172743_14.jpg

http://www.schmap.com/stlouis/toppicks_events/p=270208/i=270208_14.jpg

Returning Home.

2007-08-01T01:17:00.000-05:00

I've made it a habit to not announce the projects that I am working on until they are close to being released. There are times where I get an idea, work on it for a bit, and if it doesn't pan out, I drop it and move onto something else. If I went through the trouble to announce all of those ideas, then when the time came to announce the real deal, it would be met with a resounding, "Yeah right," from the twelve or so people who are subscribed to the feed.

After months of fleshing out ideas, and trying out new designs, I took a step back and asked myself if I could commit to this new adventure this time around. After years of thinking I couldn't, or having another project get in the way, I felt that now is the time for me to get the old band back together.

But we don't play music, and we're not rock stars. Only people in rock bands that have women throw panties at them are rock stars. Nerds, no.

So keep an eye on this space and check back every once in a while. I'll have something there soon. Until then, enjoy the bears.

http://www.bogdind.com

Coda is making my life easier!

2007-04-25T16:58:00.000-05:00

The crew over at Panic software never stop amazing me with their simple, easy to use, feature robust, non-bloated software. I remember the days of playing with Audion on Mac OS 9, and being amazed at how functional and pretty it looked in 9's very...bleak environment.

Panic is a company that proves you don't have to sell out to a bigger company to survive or make great productions.

Fun Fact: Did you know that Audion could of been turned into iTunes?

Their latest release, called Coda, is the one tool you need to code a website. It even works with buzzword worthy frameworks.

The days of having three or so programs open to make/preview your product are over. Coda includes a tabbed interface (big sell for me), file browsing, text editor, css builder, preview through Apple's WebKit (Safari), Terminal, FTP through another Panic product called Transmit, guides, and more.

When coding a site, the typical setup I had going was having Cyberduck up and running to upload files, skEdit (which could upload files through FTP too, I'm just too lazy to reenter) and an browser of my choice open.

Now I can consolidate all of that down into one window.

Cheers to Panic for making this great program. I will be getting a lot of use from it this summer.

Also, A List Apart is holding a web design survey. Head over and fill it out if it applies to you.

Well, here she is...

2007-04-18T11:38:00.000-05:00

It didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted it to. There were some "bugs," when I transfered the theme over to the CSM, and I hammered all of them out except for one. I'll squash you bug!

I will pat myself on the back for achieving the goal of making the simplest, dullest blog template known to man.

I call her, "Destin." Yes, it's named after the beach town that I grew up next to.

This is the new code base that I will use to develop other websites off of. The code still needs a bit of work and dusting, but it's still the leanest thing I've slammed together. It was an easy feat to accomplish. I'm not going to act like I spent hours making this. Actually, I probably spent a good week tweaking the color of the top header, but all I did was take a template I made two years ago and dilute it. :)

I'll be going into over time soon. I have six websites to work on, and I'll be using Destin to lay the foundation for those sites. I needed something...minimal to work with, and here it is.

EDIT 2/2/2008: What happened to those six websites? Well, they fell through. The person(s) I was making their site for lost interest, and so did I. Sucks when you live in an area that's more focused on retail than anything else, and not the inevitable future. This isn't the 90s anymore. Everyone has a website. Even if it does nothing but sit there and display a picture with your contact information, it's good for business.

Also, this here blog on bogdind was built using the "Destin" (named for its beach inspired color scheme) theme I made last year. If you're a website developer, you will know that most websites, if not all, have the same layout (minus a column or two), but the HTML magic can be written in different ways. You get the same outcome. "Destin" was written from scratch and memory. If you compare it to another blog that has a two column layout, you will see that our code differs greatly. It can depend on the Doc Type the developer wants to throw at the top of the site's code, or he/she has a different way of doing things. And that, my child, is where the magic happens.

Oh, you caught me blogging...

2007-01-20T00:50:00.000-06:00

...it's one of the many things I do here on the ranch.

When blogging, there are certain rules, very important rules, that one must remember. I pledge to you, the reader (all three of you), that I will follow these rules.

1: Never apologize for your lack of updates.
2: Never promise you'll blog more. Nothing looks better than having five blog posts on your main page that span a year, and three of those posts are you promising you're going to blog more and that you're back. I don't think anyone missed you, son.
3: Don't blog about your love life. I'm sure your male/female/both companion is down with the idea of your broadcasting what goes on behind closed doors.
4: Never talk smack about your current employer. The key word is "current," so they can fire you.
5: Never change a person's name. Be honest. Let everyone know who sucks.
6: If underage, don't blog or post photos of you drinking. In fact, people of all ages shouldn't write about their illegal activities. Bragging about crap like that doesn't make you look cool, it just makes the cop's job that much easier.

and finally

7: Never tell anyone about your blog. (wut?)

Fad

1994-06-25T12:13:00.000-05:00

I don't think this new thing called the internet is going to take off. Oh, and The Lion King was awesome. Go see it. I would link to the Wikipedia page, but that won't be out for another 10 years or so. Assuming that this thing takes off.