Enthusiasm

I kept looking at my new theme and it kept bugging me… something wasn’t right. Something about the posts was making it hard to read. At first I thought that the post column was too thin. Then I played with the font size. It still wasn’t coming to me. Then I realized that the line spacing was totally jacked. Everything ran together. The difference between a new paragraph and another line was almost indistinguishable. So I messed around with the CSS for a while and BAM, now the site is a lot more reader friendly.

Over the last two days I’ve been busy importing my LiveJournal Blog (http://cyebrvic.livejournal.com), my Tabula Rasa Blog (http://victeonus.livejournal.com), and merging it with the concepts held within the old VictorLaurence.com. I wanted one comprehensive blog that A. supported my personal journal writing,  B. my game blogging, and C. my career portfolio. I think this new blog format will do that all in one place. Additionally it has a lot more features built into it than LiveJournal and instead of having to pay a yearly fee for multiple paid LiveJournal accounts, I’m utilizing bandwidth and server space already paid for through Dreamhost (oh and I’m experimenting with Google Adsense, forgive me if it’s annoying).

As far as my overall theme of this new site, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s simple, yet says “Oregon” all over it. It’s a bit modern, but not super modern. I think it fit’s well and I like how the date is displayed on posts. Originally I was going to go with a 2 column layout, but then went with a 3 column.

One of the new features I love about WordPress is the built in spell checker is better and the fact that I can assign single posts to multiple categories. This allows me, and my readers to read specific categories of posts they care about. For example http://www.victorlaurence.com/topic/gaming/hilymi is all posts related to Hit It Like You Mean It. I’ve spent an extensive time re-categorizing all my old posts. I still need to go through all the Warcraft ones and make sure that the ones that should and should not be classified for HILYMI as classified as such.

Roleplaying was one thing that was seriously missing in my opinion in World of Warcraft. For some reason it was just really hard to get into it. I could try all I wanted but it just fealt like I was regugitating 10 years of Warcraft lore. I also couldn’t “connect” with my character in a fundimental way. The story seemed like I wasn’t REALLY that influential in the world so it was just… kinda meh.

TR on the other hand I’m REALLY getting into the roleplay aspect of it. I’ve written a few pieces of fan fiction and the folks on the official site liked it so much they started up an official “blog roll” for people with an apptitude for role play blogging of their characters. So I started another LJ blog for Victeonus (http://victeonus.livejournal.com)

I went to update my links and LiveJournal made me update my style. Kinda pissed me off at first and then I found a decently cool style. The look is nice and represents the feel that I was going for when I first made my original style. It’s a little girly, just a little too much frills, but it’s alright I can deal.

I hope my readers like it.

Worked more on Victor Laurence.com and I think I finally have the structure I want and have it laid out how I want it. I’ve removed a lot of the “news” parts and incorporated all of that into my “Projects” area I have setup now. I’m pretty excited about this site and I want to start getting some good content in there.

Today I launched http://www.victorlaurence.com. For those who read this blog, don’t worry I will continue to keep this up to date. My plan is for this site to be more of a personal nature and the other site to be more of a professional nature. Not emo on the other site, though as you know sometimes I’m a bit emo on this one. The other site is more about my projects, what I’m doing, progress I’m making, this site is more about my inner mind and expressing my life on a day to day basis. The other site of course won’t be updated daily were as this one I’ll continue to update daily. Sometimes the same subject matter might be discussed in both places, through I’ll put more technical details on the other site and more personal details on this one.

Just wanted to make a comment about my new LiveJournal user pic. In binary, it reads as “Coder”.

Yes BTW I’m alive. I haven’t posted on my blog in a long time. I put way too much pressure to post every single day and got burt out on keeping up with it. So anyhow I’m gonna still enter some back entries but I’ll do that later. Lot has happened in the last 2 months since I’ve been away from my journal.

THANKS LIVE JOURNAL!!! For those loyal paying members apprently you are given more user picks based on your tenure with live journal. I think they base the amount of bonus user picks based on a combination of time with Live Journal and how many posts you have made during that time. I know that I have 34 and I think Kerrie has 56 or something like that. She has been on LJ for YEARS, so logic tells me it’s a combination of time and posts since I’m a post maniac and she’s just been around a long time. I think I might spend part of this evening uploading more userpics so I can start taking advantage of this new bonus LiveJournal has given me.

EDIT: Apparently they changed the base user pics of a paid account from 15 to 30. Then I have 4 loyalty pics. So Kerrie on the other hand has 16 loyalty pics. So I was way off base but still pretty cool.

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