No updates for a while, huh? Nearly two months by my count.

The sad thing is, I’ve written a lot of posts for this site, they’ve all just been scrapped or left unfinished.

You’d think my traffic stats would be dwindling after this long a period without updating, but not so. They’ve dwindled slightly, but not significantly. Kind of dissolves any motivation to update for the sake of updating.

I’ve stalled out a bit due to a project I’m working on, which itself has stalled out due to being away from home for a few weeks.

Case in point, finally got down for the day, was hoping to get some work done, and just got called away to do something else.

More posts hopefully coming soon,

Lark

So I’m working on another web site. You see, the 400 monthly page-views I get here are just too much for this one site to handle. I need something to fork off my immense readership. A readership that could comfortably fit in my apartment. My apartment is quite small, for the record.

No, this other site is for a very specific purpose, contrasted with this site which exists as a hose from which I spew blather endlessly yet irregularly.

Regarding this other site, every week I think, “Next week, it’ll go online.” It’s not being delayed because the site itself needs work, it’s pretty much sitting there waiting for me to finish a completely different bit of work. Once this other bit of work is done, then the site will go up. When that will be, well, my best guess was Wednesday March 3rd, 2010. Weeks ago.

Okay, site is up, plugins are working, feeds are a go, and the site is clocked at faster than it’s ever been.

I have to admit, there was an easy way and a hard way to transfer this site over to a new server. I tried the easy way first, it didn’t work. I tried the hard way next, and hours of work later had the same problem. Plugin conflict, I shit you not, the easy way would have worked after all.

The Dashboard is much more responsive, the page header now says ‘Thrice∙berg’ breaking it up for proper pronunciation, and I updated the ‘About’ page to be much more…uh…much more something. All appears to be right as rain for the moment.

I’ll catch you folks on the other side,

Lark

Okay, I just logged in to post something (that will wait until later), and got distracted by comments in the spam filter. I checked out these comments and most of them are suspect. A few were blocked and I can not for the life of me figure out why. No links anywhere in the comment, and the text was coherent and relevant. They did use fake email addresses, so that could be one reason.

These comments were caught by Akismet, and I wonder if they came from a spam-heavy address or something. Too bad they don’t give the reason suspecting a comment as spam. Even though most of the comments were good ones I’m keeping them down while I figure out why they were blocked. I’ll try to keep a closer watch in the future.

Lark

Tonight I indulged in a time-honored tradition, ego-surfing–where you google your name. I didn’t google my own name, but the name of this website, “Thriceberg”. As it is this site mostly sits here, taking up space. In a few months it should start to take off content-wise. That said, I’ve been wondering if I should register a new domain. There is a reason for the name “Thriceberg” but that reason is all but extinct. It still has usefulness, however, when I want to sign up for some web service such as twitter and I don’t want to spend a half an hour having all variants of my name and hobbies being rejected because they’ve already been taken by some other user. In addition, it’s nice to be able to type in “thriceberg” and have 99% of the posts have some relation to me.

I’m shocked at how much is out there. 4,170 results (shut up, that’s a big number to me), most of them, I’d wager, created by bots. It’s amazing how many sites exist that just catalog other site’s material. A great number of the sites I found made notes of things I’d tweeted in the past. Not a blog post commenting on it, just re-posting it in some category on their (I’m assuming) bot-driven site in order to increase their page ranking.

After the bot-sites, there are a few video-sites that linked to old videos I used to have online. Only 3 in total, those videos used to be on this site. I took them down for various reasons, though I’m sure someday I’ll tighten them up a bit and throw them back online. Since most of these sites embedded these videos from Revver, and they’re no longer on Revver, the result was Google linking me to a bunch of empty pages. Not Google’s fault.

A few mentions my of Team Fortress 2 tweets, some apparently non-existent mentions on a Zune site (I own a Zune, thriceberg is my user name with them). A handful of blog comments, not too many. Actually, now that I think of it there are some comments I’ve made recently that I would have expected to top the search. It took a while before this site was the top result when searching the word ‘thriceberg,’ and Google still thinks it’s a misspelling. Personal goal: become so popular Google suggests “Did you mean ‘Thriceberg’?” when people search for ‘the iceberg,’ instead of the other way around.

I found two comments on two posts on a blog called “Paleo-Future,” attributed to a “thriceberg,” and for the life of me I can’t remember if I posted them. I saw a lot of old message boards I have accounts with, but the reasons for those accounts all came back to me. I suppose I could have followed a link from Boing Boing or something to this site, and decided to comment. Both are comments I could have written, although there is a lack of proper capitalization that I don’t think I was capable of at the time. They seem vaguely familiar, but I’m really not sure.

Well, those comments are from 2007, and I’ve had this domain for…going on three years now? 3 years at least, and I’ve been using the name thriceberg for longer. I didn’t dig too far in the search results, only a dozen pages or so, but that’s all I saw I couldn’t discern as either something from me or referring to me. Where was I in 2007? I refuse to even try to remember. There’s too much for me to do tonight as it is.

My primary concern with using the name “Thriceberg,” is that people won’t immediately see it for what it is–a play on the word ‘iceberg’. People may think it’s two words and mentally try to break it up. I don’t really have a reason for it, so I’m sure people will keep asking me what it means and I won’t have an answer. Okay, I’ve officially decided to come up with an interesting lie that explains the name.

I’ve also decided to keep this domain as my primary one for now. That’s official, too. People have done better with worse names, and at least this name is unique. I think, anyway.

Would you guess that I have a tendency to over-think things? Oh, you’re too kind.

Lark

Guess what peoples? I’ve got DSL.

Finally, I’m a full-fledged member of the internet. Okay, I’ve had the internet since the late 90s, and I actually had DSL in 2001, and I had cable directly after. The important thing is I HAVE IT NOW. And okay, I have broadband-quality internet on my phone, but NOW I CAN PLAY MORE GAMES ONLINE!!! NOW I CAN DOWNLOAD GAMES FROM STEAM IN A MATTER OF HOURS, NOT DAYS!!!

There may be an infinite amount of time, but there’s a finite amount of patience. I’m pretty good about diving into graphics work for hours at a time, 12+(in one sitting) at my longest. The less time I have however, the harder it is to actually sit down and work on just one thing. I don’t think I’ve gone to bed once this week without getting up shortly after to work, either because I’ve gotten another idea, or because I just can’t sleep.

At least I’m making good, if not punctual, progress.

Lark

So in a recent post I said how much easier it would be, given my crappy internet connection, if I could edit WordPress posts without going back and forth between proofreading the post as it is on the page (something I insist on doing–I always find more mistakes that way), and the editing the text in the Dashboard. Just this instant a better method occurred to me that I can follow right now. I simply keep the Edit page open in one tab, and the post open in another. No loading and re-loading, I just switch tabs to edit the text as needed.

Works for me,

Lark

Wow, I sure am talking about Google a lot lately. I guess everyone is. Anyway, I’ve been reading a little more about Google Wave, and something just occurred to me. Wave is designed so you can embed it into your website, making your comment section itself a Wave.

That considered, what if Google gave you the option to slap your own domain on a wave, add robust theme support, and made a Wave publicly available to read (with one or more admins who could edit)? Then you’d have a pretty cool blogging engine. I’m on WordPress right now, and I like it a lot. However, my internet connection at home is SLOW. Navigating the Dashboard just to post is fine, but after typing a post I go through a process of proofreading it (2nd time), editing it again, publishing it again, proofreading it AGAIN, and then if there are no problems I’m done. Hitting Edit and waiting for the Dashboard to load, then waiting for the post to re-load can get pretty time consuming. This added to the amount I spend anyway obsessing over any particular post means blogging can eat up a lot of my time. How much cooler would it be to be able to change the text on the same page I’m viewing it on? Meaning, this actual text you’re reading right now. If I’ve just posted, then my site knows who I am, why should I have to keep returning to the Dashboard to edit?

Well, one reason would be, what if I leave my site open and I accidentally hit some keys, editing the post? There’s a lot of different ways that could happen. What if, instead, the edit button on my site activates ‘edit mode,’ but doesn’t take me to the Dashboard? Instead, I edit it there, as it appears, and save it, closing the mode. Ideally WordPress should also save revisions in case something does accidentally happen. When an admin is previewing his or her site, the post could have two options side-by-side: Edit (on screen), or EiD (edit in Dashboard). Sound good to me.

Too bad I don’t have the time, money or skills to make this happen.

Lark

Don’t think I haven’t noticed there haven’t been any sleep updates lately. I know you all are dying to hear all about it. Well, here’s the thing…

Notice how I was posting 1-3 times a day for a while, and now I’m lucky if I get 1 thrown up every few days? I’ve been busy with work. Really busy. I’ve been staying up working until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. My bedtime has been pushed back, from 10pm to 12am to 2am to 4am to 6am, etc, DAILY. I’m still awake right now from the night before, at 10am. I probably won’t be going to bed until this evening, in a weak attempt to get on a somewhat normal schedule.

I evaluated my reasons for wanting to get up at regular times, and right now it’s much more important that I finish my work than it is to be consistent. It’s odd, but I still only sleep 7-8 hours at a time, I’m well rested, refreshed, ready for more work when I get up. I actually think this is how my body is wired–my sleep schedule usually creeps forward like this when I don’t have to get up at a certain time each day. I’m fine, it’s the world that’s messed up.

Back to work…

Lark