Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

Yeah yeah, call me indecisive. Now that I’m officially a manager within a global, public corporation… I think having a blog titled “O RLY, YA RLY, NO WAIH” isn’t very professional. I’ll still keep the blog’s original intention in place, this is my mental break place where I collect my thoughts. It will continue to be witty, crazy, and filled with gaming stuff. I just wanted to maintain a pseudo professional ring to it.

When someone quotes your blog with the message

“CyberVic - less creepy than it sounds.”

It’s time for a change of blog title. The other day I made a really awesome Lord of Change using the spore creature creator. Well in the Waaaagh! Blog’s News Blogs and Sites updates, they described me as quoted above. I don’t blame them, but it did make me want to spring into action. I’ve been thinking pretty hard for over a week now and came up with a somewhat witty title and encompases my blog pretty well. “Thoughts of an MMO Gamer” with the subtitle “By Victor F. Laurence: Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer”. Basically I removed CyberVic out of the title all togehter and put my name in the subtitle.

EDIT: After thinking more on it this weekend I decided on “O Rly?! Ya Rly! No Wai!!!” with the subtitle “A witty, random, and sometimes serious blog by Victor F. Laurence”.

My dad is an excellent photographer. I would call him a hobbiest, but his skill in digital and traditional photography is on a professional level. He’s been featured a couple of times in magazines and has received several awards for his photos. His best work (IMO) has to be nature (still life and active nature shots) and city scape shots, although he’s getting better and better at capturing people.

When I chose this theme for my blog I told myself that I would replace the default seashore image at the top with one that my dad has taken. So last night, after asking his permission, we looked around at his photos and cropped one appropriately for the scene you now see at the top of my blog. If you are interested in more of his work you can find him at RayLaurencePhotos.com (which is also linked to in my blogroll).

I’ve been blogging since 2005. Over the years I’ve run a personal blog, a professional blog, and some gaming blogs. I got tired of blogging in so many places that if you are a reader of my blog you know that about a month ago I merged everything “under one roof” so to speak. Now that I’ve merged so many of my different blogs into one place, I am now forced to ask myself… do I have an audience? Has the merging of my content into one blog helped or hurt my ability to advertise and get comments on some of the things I blog about?

I originally made my blog for my own memory keeping purposes, but I wonder if this has changed. Do people care about the things I’m blogging about? I’m sure my guild cares about some of the guild blogging I do, but does the general public care about some of the leadership blogging that I do or general gaming blogging. Should I blog about game reviews more? I’m not sure anymore.

So in an effort to answer the question “Do people care?”, I head out to WarhammerAlliance.Com to ask the writers out there for feedback. Maybe people do care and I just haven’t ever bothered to advertise my blog. Maybe I should. I await their comments.

So if you’re reading this. What’s your opinion of my blog and should I bother advertising it?

I’m finally pleased with my site. I got the Google ads doing what I want them to do. I have a Google site search implemented (better search than the built in WordPress searching). I installed a collapsing category and archives plug-in and now have those situated in the right place on my blog. I made custom “clean page” template for the static pages on my blog like About, Resume, Videos, etc. A while back I cleaned up some encoding problems with about half of my posts. I’ve now categorized all my blog posts and have multiple category tags. I expanded my blog roll to include all the blogs, comics, MySpace’s, and other such content I check regularly.

Most importantly, I’m very happy with my blog and have been blogging every day again. It’s a lot faster for me to blog using WordPress. Thanks to the additional features of WordPress, I’m even more motivated to blog because now I can go back and re-read my thoughts more easily than using LiveJournal.

Did more tweaks to my ad-sense. The front page and the static pages, I’m now using referral, category based, chosen advertisements which I think is appropriate (stuff people who read my blog *might* actually care about). All other pages like category, specific posts, or by month archive pages will pull their content using the AdSense engine (choosing ads based on content on the page). My hope is that this blog eventually pays for itself by covering the yearly cost of DreamHost hosting through AdSense advertisements, all while not being too overly annoying to my readers. Again, the ads I’m presenting are either content sensitive or they are chosen categories by me that I think you care about.

Also added a bunch of more links to my blog-roll including the *Mighty* Paul Barnett and one of his partners in crime, Josh Drescher (both from Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning).

EDIT: You know what, those category chosen ads stink. Switching back to just content sensitive based ads. They seem to be more reliable over time for delivering advertisments that matter based on content on my blog.

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.