August 21st, 2008
Here we are again. Isn’t this familiar? Why does this seem familiar? Oh, wait—that’s it! Right around this time last year I was ticked off. I was livid. Why? The same reason, by some odd confluence involving a matter transfuser and time travel, all people who have ever felt annoyance have for their displeasure: Wayne State University. I have long maintained that Wayne State—hereafter abbreviated as WSU—is not part of the known universe. In fact, there’s a mural in the cafeteria that proves this assertion. It depicts Old Main—the oldest building on campus—floating disembodied in outer space, with the Earth just outside the front door. Additionally, space blends into a picture of the Ambassador Bridge, flanked by pictures of gigantic WSU hockey players and (for some unrelated reason) cheerleaders. Since hockey games all have cheerleaders. Anyway, matter does not act in this manner. WSU is clearly part of another dimension, in an alternate universe accessible only whilst one is on campus.
But why really was I so ticked? You see, WSU has perhaps the most disorganized administrative department in (or out of) the world, except for maybe Blue Cross. They send out bills at random, and before the real amount owed is actually calculated. At other times, they neglect to send out a bill or notice at all and simply hand you an eviction notice. Supposedly, you were supposed to check your online WSU account—the “Pipeline”—each day with bated breath in anticipation of some new charge the college might invent on the spot discover you owe. Last year, it was a bill in excess of $5,000 I was expected to have paid before the move-in date. Actually, again there was no bill. It was listed on the Pipeline. The due date for the bill was some four days after the move-in date, so theoretically I had the extra time, but in reality my deadline was earlier. What they failed to mention was that the date financial awards—scholarships and government aid—were disbursed was four days before move-in. Wow. That’s cutting it mighty fine, eh? No helpful mention of this anywhere prudent, no E-mail reminder of this. Nothing. We had to call about the matter, at which point it was finally explained to us. I get the impression I wasn’t the only one left in the dark because, a few days later, a new stock E-mail appeared in my Inbox with a line about this disbursal date appended.
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August 21st, 2008
This marks the second night in a row I’ve been kept awake by two things: a new website, and a splitting headache. I get this way sometimes; it’s like I’ve had a never-ending headache for the past few days. Pills can only do so much, and then you can only take so many of those in a day.
Since I was going to be up, anyway, I’ve decided to soldier on with my website. I’ve completed the preliminaries on the music and tech blogs, and I’ve added a humor section and a place to showcase my music. I may do more in the future, but for now I’ve got enough to manage as it is. Initially, I was going to wait before linking to the new sites. I wanted to get some actual entries written in them, particularly the music and tech ones, before they went “live,” so to speak. As it turns out, though, I needed to see whether or not updating the “site glue” (the Home page and the dummies) would obliterate everything else in the directory. If it did, then this whole venture would have come to naught. Either way, I didn’t want to have lots of material to lose just in case that did happen. Thankfully, updating the site leaves the WordPress blog folders intact, though that doesn’t mean that mistakes can’t come in other ways.
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August 20th, 2008
Your neighborhood friendly blogger here, informing you that things here are coming together rather nicely. I’m currently working on two new pages. Big surprise; they’re blogs! Actually, each will cover a specific topic. I plan to add even more, but the two I’m developing right now are the music and tech sections. And since they’re works-in-progress, I’m not gonna tell you the URLs. Not yet. At the moment, the music one is well underway, with a wicked awesome new banner and a cool, clean layout. Unfortunately, the link back to Ryderduncan.com is jammed into the footer until further notice because I have no bloody clue how to code in a separate tab for it near the top of the theme I selected. And since I had had to remake my banner three times by the time I had chosen the current theme (and I finally got it right the third time), I’ve decided enough is enough. I’ll figure it out eventually.
As for the tech blog, yeah it exists (no, I’m not telling you where just yet), but it’s not customized and it contains no posts. I plan on getting both rolling before I remake the Home page to include tabs for them. For the music one, I’m going to be including reviews of albums, equipment, software, and other stuff. The tech one is much the same, except it’s for tech stuff.
Oh, and I’ve got a rather humorous plan for the “dummy pages” on my site. Since the program I’m using to make the Home page is an online solution, and since the WordPress blogs are grandfathered in and are not part of the web design interface, in order to create tabs on the Home page for various other sections, I’ve got to make dummy pages in order to generate those tabs. From there, I can re-route the links to the proper blogs. Since they’re there, I may as well have some fun with them. Of course I’ll have to include helpful links for those wayward travellers who (somehow) stumble upon these pages, but I may as well make it interesting. I haven’t planned these out fully yet, but if you click on a shiny new tab in the future and find yourself looking at, say, a woman peeking shamefully from behind a shower curtain (one of my ideas—don’t get any ideas, there will be no nudity), please let me know because it means I forgot to relink the tab to its appropriate blog.
That’s about it, folks. I just wanted to inform the crickets I can hear chirping in the background about what’s going on here at Ryder Duncan’s World.
Yours truly,
Squonk
August 20th, 2008
This is the first post in my new blog. While this post itself won’t be winning any Pulitzer prizes in the near future, it does signify that I have conquered foes (both endowed and UNIX) and have emerged victorious. The most agonizing part was waiting for the new domain name to finally be registered with the host, which took hours. In the mean time, I planned my attack. I had to come up with a way of linking from the main site to this WordPress blog, as well as an obvious way to return to the site proper. I had a crude enough idea how to accomplish the former, but the latter concerned me for a little while. When I finally got to work, it took me about an hour to get it all set up. I simply hacked the PHP and CSS files with some simple HTML, and it worked like a charm.
The only drawback is that I’ll have to manually replace the modified Home page every time I want to edit the site proper. But that’s no big deal, really. I’ll just keep a copy on tap locally, fire up FileZilla, and get on with my business.
So, what am I going to do with this site and this blog? I have no clue; it just seemed like a really cool idea, and I had the web space lying around collecting digital dust, so I figured why not? I had originally seen an article on PCWorld about a “do-it-yerself” WordPress blog, and I decided to launch a whole new website along with my new blog. Some of the possible uses include reviewing music equipment/software, as well as music itself. A personal outlet for the thoughts of the day is a must, as is a section devoted to slamming Internet folly. More than that, though; I can use this site as a playground for my budding (read: nonexistent) coding skills.
I think that’s enough for the first post. It’s not like I have an audience yet.