I looked at my analytics for the site for the first time in quite a while and, ouch. My readership was never particularly high, but it’s still dropped a fair bit. I can only blame myself though; I should write more frequently.

I suppose part of it is also my friends and I getting older, busier with their jobs and lives. Once upon a time you could always catch me on IM or something. These days, not so much.

I went ahead and updated the About Me page. Not that it’s particularly interesting, but I sort of had fun writing it. It’s missing a section about my professional background, but I haven’t decided what I wanted to put in that place yet.

I also updated the tagline of this site to more accurately reflect what this site has been about. Maybe that’ll motivate me to post some more meaningful content once in a while.

As promised the upgrade to WP 2.2 is done. If you see anything weird around here, leave a comment.

I came home today with the full intent on upgrading to WP 2.2 and taking care of a few things on the site, but it’s amazing how easy it is to get distracted. I started playing around with my mac and updating a few tools that I’ve been using lately, then catching up on some of my feeds, dinner, and then before you know it, it’s after 10:00 PM. The days really just start to go by faster than you can keep track of the older you seem to get.

Well, I can say I did do a few things at least to prepare for the upgrade. I suppose I’ll get to it tomorrow afternoon.

On the work front, I love my new job. It’s pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I think it’ll continue to get better as well, especially when my new project starts up. There are a couple things I am uncertain about related to my current project, but that’s pretty typical when you inherit any software system. Every developer has their own style for working, and it just so happens that the previous developer had one that was moderately different from mine. Not worse really, just quite different. It’s good to be exposed to this kind of thing though; I’ve already learned a couple things that when you put it together with what I already knew, the result is greater than the sum of the parts.

Now running on WP 2.1.3, and several other upgraded plugins. However, I’m noticing some strange things. Not sure if they were working before though, so who knows. Here’s the laundry list:

• Search does not work. You can put something in and hit search, but it never finds anything. This is caused by a bad query in Ultimate Tag Warrior trying to hook into the search. I’ve disabled UTW for now and will fix the query soon.
• Recent Posts widget disappears on the search page. Spent a little while researching it and I can’t pinpoint the issue yet. This is also caused by UTW, though I’m not sure why. Disabling it fixes the issue.
• Meta section is missing a bunch of features it had before. Looking at the actual code for that section shows that the missing links are still there, so they’re not rendering for some reason (or a different piece of code is being called). Fixed by simply removing that category. The RSS links were the most important and Sidebar Widgets now has a separate widget for that, so problem solved I guess.
• Code highlighting plugin doesn’t render properly on archive views of posts. This doesn’t surprise me really and isn’t an issue per se, but it would be nice if this rendering did work.

I re-uploaded all the files, so I’m fairly certain that’s not the issue. Could be the theme (which I also upgraded). I’d really like to make my own theme but I just don’t seem to have the time right now. Regardless these obviously aren’t really serious issues. I’ll work through them as I can.

Edit: I’ve been thinking through this a bit more and it raises a question that I’ve actually wondered a bit. What’s really the best way to navigate through a blog? Search is obviously helpful, but proper categorization and tagging (which I’m not doing yet but want to) seems more valuable to me. I don’t get those long lists of monthly archives, they just grow and don’t seem to provide a lot of value. The calendar control is a decent compromise, though it’s a bit time consuming to navigate. An AJAX-ified version of the calendar control would be a lot nicer.

If you have any thoughts on the subject, leave a comment. I might just get rid of search and start tagging and get some tag clouds and what not.

A while back I switched from my old host over to MediaTemple and I’ve been nothing but satisfied with the service. Now I’m even more satisfied though. They recently put their “grid server” system online which I’ve been waiting for and migrated over very easily. Also, I now just have a obscene amount of storage and transfer, so I’ll be able to probably code up (or find/use) a nice little flash player for my music! That will be pretty cool I think. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for some time, so when I get a little free time (my current project has me swamped) I will begin the process.

Speaking of music, Ableton Live 6 did come out and I did buy it (ouch, pricey) and I absolutely am in LOVE with it. I keep thinking of other cool stuff I want to do though, like get Ms. Pinky timecode vinyls and a deck or two so that I can scratch. But, I have to remind myself the reason I went with Live was because you could do so much more than with decks. Scratching (and a few other DJ type necessities like a easier way to do beat juggling, a view where you can see all your effects chains and two waveforms at once, etc.) is unfortunately missing but it might make it in to a future release, who knows. There’s enough I don’t know how to do with the software already that I don’t need to put any more on my plate.

I am excited about one thing though. As soon as I knew it was coming out I pre-ordered the Novation Remote Zero SL (pic) and I found it finally shipped today and would get to me tomorrow! This thing is completely sick. It’s bigger brothers have semi-weighted piano keys, lockable X-Y joystick, trackpad, and a much bigger price tag. I really wanted the trackpad and joystick on this thing, but I suppose it isn’t that big of a deal. I do have the excellent M-Audio Ozonic which had a 3 octave keyboard, plenty of knobs, and faders as well as a (non-lockable) X-Y joystick. It also has a firewire audio interface. On top of that I use the M-Audio Trigger Finger as sort of an analog controller with the pressure sensitive pads for sweeps and ramps and stuff. You can set the velocity curves many different ways, so it’s not hard to get the effect you want and just wail on two pads at once.

I love this music stuff so much.

There’s a decent chance this site might experience some downtime. I’m working on moving servers, so while the transfer is in progress things might get a little dicey. It shouldn’t last though.

Ever since WP took a dive on me a few weeks ago (and I had to come back to my even more defaulty look) I’ve had a bit of a disinterest in blogging. Which makes me sad, because I want to do it more. I think so much of has to do with the style and design of a blog that I’m just not pleased with my current look. I’ll take it one step further though…

Back in the old days I started using something called Newspro (I think newer incarnations are called Coranato or something along those lines). Then there was Greymatter, which I used for quite some time, followed by b2 and now WordPress since it was in beta. I haven’t really looked at other platforms very much. Does any one have any other recommendations of platforms that are worth checking out? Chances are I’ll stick with WP due to my familiarity, but one this is for certain: This design has got to go.

I think of the blogs I visit Dan Rubin’s has to be my favorite design. I think tonight I’m going to need to break out the bar napkins and a pen and doodle some ideas down.

I’ve been a fool all along.

Those who have known me for a while also know I’ve been at this whole “blogging” thing for some time. Except of course when I started they weren’t really called blogs, they were called “E/N sites”, but the idea was generally the same. You had individuals (or in some cases groups of individuals) who posted on a site about whatever. For me, I posted about random gaming crap and other inane topics that a teenager talks about. That was the very start of it actually, the thing that got me into web development at all.

Way back when (1997 if I recall correctly) the first real web presence I had was working with another guy on a site for Star Wars: Rebellion. The game itself ended up being horrible, but the practical experience it gave me doing some real web development was invaluable. I was already a good programmer at the time (C, C++, and other strange languages), but web development was something new, and obviously catching on fire like nothing else at the time.

Soon that grew from a fan site for a single game into good old Strategy Command. It’s been defunct for quite some time now, but for a short while the site was doing fairly well and had a considerable following. After a while I wanted something a little more personal and so Charged Particle was born. It was there in 1999 that I had my first site that would be recognizable as what we now call a blog. And then of course there was the various subdomains, liquience.org, and now this.

That brings me to the point of this article. Because a strong part of me values consistancy, cleanliness, and other things that would get me labeled “anal”, I had a strong tendency to start over, time and time again. The result? Six years of archives are gone. Sure, the quality of what I used to write wasn’t exactly what it is now, but there was a history there and it would have been interesting to see the evolution. Also, it would have been nice to have the proof that I’ve been at this thing (on and off admittedly) as long as most anyone has.

So the solution going forward is to be more careful, and to not blatantly disregard the archive. In some sense this tool isn’t just a way to put my voice out there for everyone to hear, but also for me to look back and see where I once was.