The Whitehawk

I am going to start updating the design. However, the blog part will be the last to get updated, or should I say, it’s going to be updated by bits and pieces. I’m going to get it functional at first and then style it as I find the need to.

So even though it might change, it will still be a work in progress.

I will first update the static pages (in other words, all the pages except for the blog) and then move on to wordpress theeming.

If you have any comments you’d like to add about the redesign feel free to.

The new version of the site is about 80% complete. What’s left to do now is to put the content in and re-write some of it and create classes for the blog content.

And as an added bonus, this blog will now feature a live list of my latest articles from ForeverGeek, so if you want to you’ll be able to keep up with them if you wish. I’m more active in blogging than you might think

So look forward to that, more news as they come.

With the exception of the time I had my blog powered by Blogger (in which all blogs get spam, no matter how little) today was the first time I got a spam comment on this blog.

I didn’t know if I should be sad or happy about it. A web crawler just probably found me by following one of my comments on forevergeek or on other blogs. But still, I guess it must mean that I’m more connected to other sites and blogs, whether by Technoratti or other blog portals, or just comments on blogs I read.

So I guess that makes me feel a bit happy. I quickly installed the Akismet in a few seconds (I already knew about it but I just didn’t need it yet) and I guess I won’t have many more problems anytime soon.

I just wish the rest of my day was going this well.

I struggled, I really did, I tried to maintain Sitemeter for this website. But it just isn’t possible.

I want this site to be transitional, and with it’s code it’s impossible, unless I used a lame technique such as iframes which could eventually mess up the statistics.

So, farewell Sitemeter. And farewell public statistics for this site.

Fellow readers and friends,

I regret to inform that I will for the next uncertain number days be unable to post on this blog. Reason being, that it needs to be redone. There are too many things not looking the same on all browsers, and frankly the best way I see to fix it is to start over and remove some CSS declarations that were unnecessary.

Also, college is starting Monday, and I need to get ready, I will spend the next few days working that project I’ve told you about and doing some exercises from high-school, since for the first days of college I’ll be reviewing them.

I’m sorry about this but writing for ForeverGeek, keeping track of the comments and building the site that I’m doing take up too much of my time.

As soon as I get some free time I’ll be back and hopefully better. I’ll also take note of any hacks or exploits I use to get things to display properly on this site.

Post Script: I noticed I just went over 500 unique visitors and I’m quickly approaching the 1k clicks number. The traffic for the blog has slowly, but steadily been rising with one or two boost of traffic in between and I thank everyone for visiting and taking their time to read my rants and thoughts. I’ll see you in a few days hopefully and once again, thank you.

During the past days when I was implementing some changes on the site I always had the feeling that something was missing and today I realized what it was; this blog didn’t have a feed yet!

So, without second thought I went to see what the feed’s address for the blog was and registered it on Feed Burner in order to get some stats out of them. So, if you want to add this blog to your feeds the address is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheWhiteHawksBlog

I hope I see the number on the Feed’s button grow as time goes by

If you don’t know what a feed is I’ll give you a short explanation. Feeds are an easy way to aggregate information from various sites such as blogs or news sites without you having to visit all of them separately. Some browsers already support feeds, like Firefox and Opera for example. However, I prefer to use a separate program to view them. From the ones available I recommend FeedReader (free) and FeedDemon (payed).

Why?

Well, for those that don’t know, I am an editor in Forever Geek, I’m also giving a shot at the Web Design business so I set up an easy way for anyone that requests my services to pay me, that’s the only point of the button.

Of course if you want to make a donation for Christmas or my Birthday (*cough*24th of January*cough*) I won’t get upset over it

But still, seriously, the donate button is just to facilitate possible future transactions, nothing more. I’m not giving any public service here, if you want to invest your money on anything then go to the red cross site or any other similar organization’s site.

Yep, I just implemented Gravatars on the comments. What are Gravatars you might ask? Well, I already gave you two links to the site to find out what they are.

The rating for Gravatars on this blog is PG and the default size is 40×40 since I think it suits best this blog theme.

A Gravatar is basically a “global” avatar that you can use on any blog or site that has it implemented. Think of it as your IM Avatar, only for blogs. The only difference is that you register through Gravatar.com and you have to wait for it to get a rating. For more information on the image ratings click here.

How does the site recognize which Gravatar is yours? By your e-mail. So in order for your Gravatar to appear here you need to use the same e-mail you used to register, but don’t worry, your e-mail will not be displayed on the blog for spammers, nor will it’s source address contain it.

I’m being sarcastic of course, seems like something is messing up the design… again. And guess where the design is getting messed up, on our lovable IE.

So over the next few days I’m going to try and fix them, on the meantime you can already enjoy the clean and not broken design on Firefox.

The errors will have to be fixed on Monday, since my IE’s settings are not the default ones, therefore I can only access a computer that has them next week, until then I appreciate your patience.

Well, I really did it, I purchased a domain and installed Wordpress, but it seems that it will be a while before I manage to create a fully skinned theme since I have to learn it from scratch.

Until then, welcome to the blog, and enjoy this design for the time being