The past few weeks have been more focused on making my finances a little bit more cost-efficient. Since I can't do much about the household and familial needs, I decided to turn my attention to my online costs. Currently, I maintain four domains (will.ph, gormful.com, shutterview.net, and infi8.com). All of my domains are powered by WordPress and hosted with 1and1 Webhosting. I've been with my host for more than two years now, and so far, I can't complain. However, I wanted to find out if I can still cut back on my hosting expenses. Looking at my domains, I can only discontinue one of them, with infi8.com being the most eligible candidate for the axe, but not until I find new homes for my subdomain residents (friends and family, all two of them). The axe gets stayed in the meantime while I collect my thoughts and think about this more. Also, with four domains to maintain, it's beginning to eat up a lot of my free time, which is something that is very rare and precious for me. I decided to move the content of gormful.com to Tumblr. I chose Tumblr because I wanted to try out its engine, and that the themes are more customizable than WordPress.com's offering. The move was a bit tedious as Tumblr doesn't support importing posts from WordPress, and vice versa. I had to re-post each and every single entry I had from gormful.com to Tumblr. Luckily, I only have about 19 entries, so it wasn't so bad. I also found a theme that, with a few tweaks here and there, I was able to customize a theme that suited my taste. All in all, it took me less than a couple of hours to move the entries and update the A record of gormful.com to point to my Tumblr. Now, I don't have to spend as much time as I did before to maintain gormful.com. I can even reblog entries with a few clicks from Tumblr blogs that I follow. It definitely made updating gormful.com more regularly an easy task, though I haven't reblogged anything yet. My photoblog, shutterview.net, may be a little bit neglected, and new entries are very infrequent, but that is caused by my inherent ability to procrastinate. I love taking pictures, but I dislike having to undergo the tedious process of editing/resizing pictures and uploading them. Hence, the lack of updates. I will be spending more time with it in the future, but for now, a lot of my time has been spent in one big juggling act. As for this blog, I'm kinda stuck in a rut right now and I can't seem to feel inspired with what's going on in the tech world that it doesn't prompt me to write anything about it. Hence, this filler pretending to be a post.

Now that a week has passed since the new year has begun, it has only been now that I start thinking of what has happened in the past year and what I will do with this new one. It may be a little late to do a recap of what has transpired since, but who's checking anyway? A previous conversation with Death, the Righteous Babe, sorted me out. That's what I'd like to think. And should I even start making a list of what I want to accomplish this year, even if I know that I won't even remember less than half of it, and even less of it I'll be able to accomplish, deliberately or accidentally? I can feel my shoulders start rising in anticipation of a big shrug. What the heck, right? Anyway... The past year has been kind to me. I was given a chance to help out in the development of WordPress 2.7, testing-wise. And because of this, in some small way, I am a WordPress developer, I like to think, at least for a fleeting moment. As for blogging, I would like to think I have helped, in some way, WordPress users trying to integrate the new threaded comments feature thru a post I wrote based on somebody else's work and on my experiences trying to do so with mine. I believe I amused a lot of people by posting a couple of puzzles that I was able to solve. Not a big feat, but at least it provided some entertainment while waiting for my downloads to finish. My professional life has been pretty stable, to say the least, and I couldn't want anything more than where I am today, except for a bigger paycheck, which is considered by most to be a pipe dream, but dream, I shall continue. I have nothing but kind words and praises for my webhost, 1&1 Internet Hosting, as they have been an excellent host and I'm proud to say that after about two years with them (I lost count after the first 6 months), I've had no problems whatsoever. Well, nothing I couldn't fix on my own. I learned and re-learned a great deal also when I switched to Ubuntu as my main operating system. I have not yet switched my computing entirely to Linux as the iPhone prevented me to do so. And no, the iPhone wasn't mine, but my wife's. It's hers and I can not complain about it. I do play with it sometimes. So does my two-year-old son, whom finished a level of Labyrinth in 2.232 seconds. Accidentally, of course, but he was able to repeat it in 2.365 seconds. Go figure. And I admit, I sometimes miss the old Redmond beast that is XP. At least I'm using the lesser of two evils. A quick look at a previous post listing my resolutions for 2008 made me realize I accomplished 3 out of 6 goals, with another one pegged as debatable. I was able to buy a flash, a lens, and a camera bag for Cap, my Canon EOS 350D, which spawned a very neglected photoblog.The debatable goal was the last: me being a better provider for my family. I was able to hold down a couple of regular moonlighting gigs, but stress took its toll and I opted out in return for some quality time with and without my family. But as the new year looms, I have been considering, for quite some time now, if I should sell all, and I mean ALL my camera gear. Anyway. The past year also gave me the chance to go out and admire Mother Nature again, as I was able to go hiking and do some mountaineering. It made me appreciate what the earth has been providing us, and guilty at the same time at how much waste we throw back. The goal for this year is to be green, to conserve more, to recycle more, to do everything BUT waste more. And that would be one of my resolutions for this year. Which means I would have to revive my other resolution to quit smoking, which is my Kryptonite whenever I feel stressed. And since I started off my list with being green, I'm going to have to cut back in my lifestyle. What does this entail? Well, let's see. Reduce the number of sticks of cigarette I smoke, if I can not quit smoking. And be aware of it. Avoid unnecessary purchases, and have the wisdom to know which is and which isn't. And also be aware of it. Reward myself, frequently if it's a very, very cheap (read: free) thrill, or one big reward for the whole year. Life will surely suck if I don't get a chance to enjoy it. Remember always to find simpler ways to do things, and make sure it doesn't complicate anything. The new motto: measure twice, cut once. I will not cross my fingers, but instead, brace for impact. This way, I'm prepared for the worst, and then be surprised, and gladly, if it turns out for the best. It's better if you lower your expectations.

Yesterday, December 10th, WordPress 2.7 RC2 was released, and a day later, which is today, December 11th, the stable version of 2.7 is finally released. A month overdue from it's supposed release date, but the wait was well worth it. I have been following and testing the WordPress 2.7 since it's pre-beta days, and I became a first-hand witness to the evolution of 2.7's development. The transformation I witnessed was awesome, and I realize that I now regret not getting screenshots of each and every iteration that has become what it is today. The new administrative interface is more intuitive. The new features and functions the developers integrated is somewhat the answer of a typical users usual gripes. Here are some screenshots that I managed to get before and after WordPress 2.7 was released. [gallery link="file" columns="4"] In one word, spiffy. [caption id="attachment_774" align="aligncenter" width="734" caption="SPIFFEH!"] [/caption] Kudos to the WordPress Developers. This is truly one great milestone in the history of WordPress.

Although I haven't been as active in my blog as much as I wanted to, no thanks to Plurk, I do check my blog and find out if there are any new comments awaiting moderation. I'm also currently developing a new theme for my blog, one which I will not be releasing publicly, yet, and I'm planning on deploying it by the end of the month. It's almost done, but it would still need some testing to see if there are any bugs that pop-up after deployment. For now, it's still under development but it is very close to being deployed. One of the main hang-ups of this new theme is the name. I still haven't decided on what name I will dub this theme. Suggestions are welcome, and highly appreciated no matter how juvenile or mundane it may be. As for comments awaiting moderation, there were quite a few that made me doubt the intention of the commenter. One of the comments that are currently awaiting moderation, one that I don't think I'll approve is shown in the picture below. It seems to be a valid comment. Desperate, maybe, but still worthy of approval. What made me think twice of approving the comment is that the entry the comment was added to was published years ago. The comment may be related to the entry, but paranoia bells started ringing when I think about comment spammers and their methods, however desperate it may seem, that this may be one of those unorthodox methods that might be implemented by them blog defilers. What my paranoia senses were telling me was that this commenter, bot or not, is trying to get their email address approved, so that when they add comment spam, it gets automatically approved. It makes sense. At least, for me. Leaving out the paranoia, the commenter may simply be bored out of their wits and is trying to reach out to get someone touch them, literally or figuratively speaking. And another blogging oddity that I noticed concerns WordPress. It's really not a big deal because it's not happening anymore, but when I refreshed the admin page, it was prompting me that there's a new version available and that I should upgrade my installation. I would have done what it was suggesting, but what it was prompting me to do was to upgrade to the version that I already have. See the screenshot below. Weird.

Dissed by Graffiti CMS. Would it let you put ads on your personal-licensed blog? Or do you have to get a commercial license to do so?