Possible Blog Format Change?

I've been thinking of making some adjustments to this blog. Specifically the template format for the look of the thing. I mostly want to change it so I can post larger pics. With the current size/template I'm using (on of the older ones on Blogger) if the picture is too big anything on the right side of the picture doesn't show.

I plan on doing some experimenting over the next day or two. So probably by the end of this weekend things will look a bit different.

Website Woes

Death of Personal Domain?



Well I don't know how much longer I will/can maintain my personal website Nesredna's Knook since the domain expired near the end of May. I thought that renewing it would be easy but the company that I got the notice about the domain expiring apparently isn't the company that holds the registration info. The company that does hold it was supposedly bought by the company I got the expiration notice from. Then the "who is" website that supposedly tells you who owns a domain indicates a third company that has nothing to do with my site at all, thus has none of the information. So I was totally confused as to who I COULD send the money to and tried contacting all of them. It is odd when companies DON'T TAKE your money. Unfortunately I let the registration expire before acting on trying to transfer the dang thing. Most registration companies don't transfer expired domains. I'm trying to get it transferred to the hosting service that I used for the content of my site. Even though they normally take my Paypal money to pay for the hosting service, they don't seem to have Paypal available for ordering a registration transfer.

It is now in "redemption period" which apparently means the site has expired and can be sold to the highest bidder or something. Looks like things are screwed.

Fortunately most of my site stuff I have on floppy discs and some stuff on a thumb/flash drive. That is except for some of the graphics I think. I'm fairly sure I have most of those saved somewhere but I think most of them are on ancient floppy discs not the flash drive. I might not have all of my graphics/images saved though that would really suck.

Anyway I know some of the images I have used on this blog were hosted at my site so those are now those broken images, the white squares with a red "X" or just aplain blank space depending on which browser you are using and how they handle broken image links.

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2013

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Another year has come and gone. This one like the last few has flown by quickly too quickly. One of the things I used to do at years end was to post a "Year In Review"over at my personal website Nesredna's Knook, but I decided not to continue with that tradition. I used to update them pretty frequently and try to keep up with it month-to-month, but this past year I hardly did anything with it. So my personal tradition of that will go away after 13 years. Maybe I'll change my mind sometime during this year of twenty-thirteen but I doubt it. I don't update my website as much as I used to partly due to the easier format of blogging. It is 100 times easier just to blog to get personal things up on the web than it is to write/code HTML. I have to make sure I have copies of all my stuff that is on my website especially the graphics. I have copies of each html page and some of the graphics, but I want to be sure I have that stuff saved somewhere else in case I ditch my website completely. I'm pretty sure I've got most of it, but there are a few things I think over the years I got rid of my backup copy thinking I didn't need it because the website was solid, and I didn't want my hard drive cluttered or have a floppy disc lost somewhere. Now its a case of having an appropriate storage device that is not obsolete. Not maintaining a website will save me some money in the long run because I have to renew the domain name every year, or every other year as well as the monthly payments to the web hosting service I use. Also my website has become more of just a small data storage place. A temporary one because as soon as I stop making payments to the site, or when I pass from this Earth all that data will go away. Nice thoughts right?

Lets see what is my post total for the Year of 2012?

January: 3
February: 4
March: 7
April: 1
May: 1
June: 1
July: 3
August: 1
September: 1*
October: 4
November: 5
December: 7

TOTAL: 38

*For my other blogs Captkirk42s Trading Card Blog and Curly W Cards I didn't blog in September although for one of them I tried on the final evening of September to post something and I started it in September but by the time I finished the post it was October and the time stamp didn't play that "using California time" thing like it sometimes does. I need to improve on making posts for ALL my blogs.

Upgrade to website

After what seems like ages tweaking and trying to figure out new ways of doing things I finally got some of my upgraded pages on to my website klandersen.com.The upgrades/changes are not anywhere near complete but I at least have a majority of the main pages updated to my new CSS style look.

One of the biggest problems I've had recently is trying to remember where some of my images are tucked away if I don't have them on my website or on my thumb drive that I use to keep my current working files for my site. I also noticed that many of my links to anything I used the old Geocities technique of just needing the file or page name, without the rest of the website URL so there are many places where I wanted an image that I don't have one right now. For some reason some of these the latest version of Firefox (4.0) ignores images it can't find so the page doesn't show a space for it. ACK!

Sigh another app at Yahoo being closed down.

Changes, changes changes. Yahoo is making more. I learned of this latest change they are going to do from a blog I follow Eye of Polyphemus. Yahoo is closing down their free website hosting "Geocities". They have just made the announcement so far, and say that the shut down will happen around the summer. Details on how to save current accounts will be given a little later. They will no longer have a free service you will have to pay $4.95/month for their Yahoo domain service. At least it looks like you can choose your own domain name.

Back in 1997 when I first set up my free account with Geocities the choices of free website hosting was limited to about 3 or 4 services, and the webhosting services that you had to pay for had prices that were skyhigh. Also at the time when you set up your Geocities website you chose a neighborhood to move into there were neighborhood categories like "Hollywood" for entertainment related sites, "Soho" for arts related sights yadda yadda. For my sight I chose the Athens/Olympus area because I wanted mysite to be mostly original poems and writings I wrote, well I branched out in to other areas. Shortly there after Yahoo bought Geocities and the website urls were renamed from the long neighborhood addresses to simply "geocities.com/youraccountname". For extra $$ you can get your own domain name and that eliminates the ads that appear on your site.

Oh getting back to my main part of this rant. Earlier this year Yahoo shut down it's Breifcase function, which was primarily another storage area for all sorts of files. It was primarily designed to shuttle files from your home computer to work or vice versa. At least that they gave some warning about. About a year or two ago they got rid of their Yahoo Photos service, which was like photobucket, or flickr without any warning (at least without any warning I remember). Unfortunately for me I didn't know about the photo shut down and lost who knows how many photos. I think anything of any real importance I still have elsewhere, but since I didn't have anytime to make preparations I don't know if I lost anything that was just over there. Sigh. With the briefcase, which I used a little bit but not too much, I was able to save whatever was there that I wanted. Hopefully with Geocities I will be able to save what I want. Right now there are some photos there that are only there that I know of so I'll have to do some saving. Most of my regular pages over there I have updated/duplicated at my own website klandersen.com.

Gee thanks Yahoo.

Gotta Get Blogging More.

(*Found this picture here clearwave.ca)

Yeah, OK I've gotta get offa my tush and get blogging more often. It's Mid-April and I've only done 4 posts this year. Lets see, I average about 37 posts a year, which is only about 3 posts a month. Hmmm not bad, but not good as far as the blogging world is concerned. I guess it's all that time I spend on Facebook and Twitter. One thing about Twitter that I don't like is when you follow someone (or a group) you get ALL their updates whenever they update, so for twits that Twit (or is it Tweet?) constantly your homepage is filled updates from that one group. You can't follow someone and only occasionally check their updates. OH Well.

Anyway I have two books that I need to review here, and add to my A Recent Read listing. I also need to update and fix somethings on my website klandersen.com For that I was going to try learning about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and started doing that, because that is how most websites now-a-days are coded. My big problem with it though is I want a link list on a side bar like my site has so I don't have to always update a million pages when I want to add or delete a link. So far I'm confused as to how to get that actually done, because when I experiment with it the ways people have mentioned how to do it don't seem to work. So I will probably have to continue to do things the very long old-school HTML way.

First Words of 2009!

It's a brand new Year so lets get going with it and hit the ground running. I usually send out an email near the New Year that gives my Year In Review. I am not sending out that email this year. I end up adding it to my website anyway so that is what I will do from now on. I think I will make monthly updates to it and just post the updated version as I go on the website. Of course I need to make sure I can still update my old site. It seems they might have changed the way files get uploaded to the site so I'll have to play with things to see if I can still make changes if not I'm SOL.

Me being Goofy (Circa 1993)

I will not make any New Year's Resolution, because I don't make those. Why make an outrageous promise that you might not be able to keep. Also who checks at the end of the year to see if you kept your resolution. Who remembers the resolution they made? EXACTLY!

Last Words of 2008!

OK so here we are at the very tail end of the year 2008. Two-Thousand and Eight Years since the last transition of how man keeps track of his own made concept Time. Well really something like 2053 years the calendar has been used (See Julian lendar). If your Jewish it's still 5769 So Party On! You've got plenty of the year left! This past year has been pretty good to me for the most part. I'll have some of the boring details on my website Nesredna's Knook on my Year In Review page(s) there. I should have it updated in a few days or so.

RANDOM PICTURE:

So Happy New Year all 4 or 5 (if that many) of you who read this silly Blog. I've been in shows with some of you, I've laughed with some of you, I may have cried with one or two of you, and one of you I might have... well never mind that I'll just edit this bit later. LOL!

Why CNET Why?

It was a sad Monday today 29 September, 2008. A beloved website designed to keep track of DVD collections was given the old heave-ho by the corporate weasels that had bought it about a year or so ago. I am talking about one of the best, if not the best, DVD collection tracking websites. DVDSpot.com was an excellent resource of DVDs that are available world-wide. Each entry for a particular title had just about any and all information you would want to have for a DVD release (so long as it was a legitimate release, no bootlegs or pirated copies were allowed). I have yet to find a compatible collection website for other hobbies, or even for DVDs. There are a few that come close, but I really loved the feel of The DVDSpot.

Well during the day on Monday 29 September, the following message was posted on the main home page of my beloved DVD tracking website from the current corporate owners of the site CNET.com. Red text on a bright yellow background.


"On Wednesday October 15th DVDSpot will be closed permanently. This decision was made to allow us to focus on other great web properties. We sincerely appreciate everyone's contribution to the DVDSpot community and hope you enjoyed the free services it provided. We understand many people will not want to lose their personal collection data, so we remind you that you can export that data to file by going to Membership Tools while logged in and clicking the Export to File button. This will create a file with all movies in your Owned and Watched lists. Also keep in mind the editor system for approving DVD additions and edits has been disabled, so no new or edited DVDs will be added."

To say that this angered many of the regular users would be an understatement. The site also has a forum board, that I visit and participate in on a daily (when I can) basis. It has many people who share a common interest, the collection and watching of movies and TV shows on DVD.


Similar sites and forum boards have come and gone. One that stood out was called Guzzlefish.com (a petstore website occupies that domain name now), even though it had a neometal/punk type feel to it, the GF site was a useful site. Unfortunately I didn't take full advantage of it when it was around. It had categories for music and the VHS format in addition to DVDs. I took a break from it for a year or so, returned (never completely filled out my music collection or videos) and then 6 months to a year or so later it was gone. For a while there was a forum board website called Guzzlefish Forums Refugee which was an attempt to give former members a nostalgic feel on a different site. Well the traffic on that site died down and so did the site. Now the url to that site, which was somebodies personal ID name from the old GuzzleFish site, is some sort of personal website of some guy (I guess the same guy) and his hobbies which I think include hunting and para-military groups or something. DVDSpot.com has followed in the website death march.

Good news is that some of the die hard moderators who helped on the DVDSpot have started a new Refugee Forum for DVDSpot members at bulletpointreview.com. Many of the regular DVDSpot folks had been old GuzzleFish folks so a lot of them have tried all sorts of sites. Most agree that The Spot was the best. Others have said that DVDProfiler is better, well it does have the offline aspect to it, in addition to the online database. There is also DVDAFicianado.com (DVDAF.com) which not as many like, mostly because it is slow to get updates, hard to make additions (or wait for approval to make the additions) and it looks awful. A semi-recent update made it even more unbareable to use.

Well I guess it's back to the slide rule, colored construction paper and paste.

Website? What Website?

Oh Man.
I've been sort of ignoring my website (klandersen.com) lately. Since starting my blog over here at blogger, I have all but abandoned my "Semi-Blog" over there. Its a lot easier to blog at a site where you don't have to worry about the coding, than a site where you have to format your entries. I need to update the semi-blog to refer it here. OH well. Nothing to see here move it along.