Fauxzen.com » The Site

Site is not broken…

Shelby — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:51:52 +0000

While I know the site looks like its missing the stylesheet, it really isn’t. I have been messing around trying to make the site as fast loading and as minimal as possible… so it should start to take better shape soon enough.

WordPress 2.7 RC2

Shelby — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:20:50 +0000

Since Jason over at ChurchoftheGeek posted a tweet about WordPress 2.7, I had to update myself. So far it seems pretty nice. I am really enjoying the new layout in the admin area. though a little more cluttered than before it seems pretty nice as they arranged everything really well.

Forum Software

Shelby — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:48:48 +0000

I am on the look for a new forum software. Mainly want something simple but allows user levels and it would be a plus if it worked well with WordPress right out of the box so there would not be a need for multiple logins. I know there is a lot of bridging software available out there for certain forum software so that part prob wont be a problem. I have used vBulletin, Invision in the past which are very full featured… but they cost money. Anyone have any ideas?

LifeStream

Shelby — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:46:35 +0000

So yesterday I came across SweetCron, and liked the idea of it. I was half tempted to installed it until I came across a plugin for WordPress. I have installed the plugin and now you can follow my LifeStream here. Also you may have noticed that I removed the Flickr feed at the bottom of the site…

No Love for Flickr

Shelby — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:37:02 +0000

I decided not to renew my Flickr account. They want to give me 3 months free if I sign up again. But I have decided to go back to my roots and use Gallery2. Gallery2 has come a long way and I can import photos via email messages, just like I did with Flickr. And they allow for a whole bunch of goodies now. I will post the link once I get around to uploading all my images again.

SSL Goodness

Shelby — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:27:13 +0000

Thanks to InMotion hosting, Fauxzen.com now has SSL. Right now its only running for the WordPress admin section, but I might push it over to the rest of the site just because.

Bring in the readers

Shelby — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:05:29 +0000

Over the years I have had many different approaches to bringing in visitors to my sites, have it be spamming other sites(I don’t do this anymore thankfully), using adult content of some sort, or just having a good read here and there. I am once again in the process of looking over the site and seeing how to attract traffic… But this time some more relevant traffic. I was speaking with Ted and he has gone from zero visits a day when I helped him get his site setup to having about 70k a month unique (Correct me if I am wrong Ted). Anyways I hope in the months to come to have some valid visitors coming this way reading some hopefully well written articles (I might need help on this if you know anything about my writing skills). Well anyways this post was once again a little ramble off the top of my head and nothing of real importance, but if you have any suggestions about driving traffic I would be interested in hearing them.

Twitter killing blogs?

Shelby — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:58:11 +0000

I have been trying to figure out why there is such a lack of updates on blogs that I follow, including mine. I am kind of noticing a trend that the people that used to blog a lot seem to have a pretty up2date twitter account. I know I am guilty of not blogging due to my frequent yet unimportant updates on twitter. Is anyone noticing this as well? Do you think that twitter, pownce and systems like those might be somewhat of a downfall to full fledged blogs? I have been dabbling with the idea of actually moving my blog into a sub folder and then just putting up a front page that gets the RSS feeds from my twitter, last.fm, flickr etc and displays those on the front of my site and then just offering a link to my blog.

Plugin Upgrades

Shelby — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 08:50:48 +0000

Wow I have a lot of plugins that are out of date… I should really fix that.

Site rankings and mistaken gender

Shelby — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:57:19 +0000

My Technorati ranking is an astonishing 14,926… I am actually very surprised by that good of a rank, especially considering that Alexa ranks me at 1,697,852. I swore that they used to somewhat go hand in hand with rankings, but clearly that is no longer the case these days. Hopefully in due time my Alexa ranking will even our with the other.

Besides all the ranking who ha, I thought I would present this nice little gem that came into the help desk this evening. I removed some of the less important aspects of the message as not to bore the 3 people that read my site.

… and I just wanted to commend you and your colleagues for the promptness and friendliness of your service. This time I had Shelby D reply to my latest query in the usual very speedy and comprehensive fashion, so I thought I should drop Shelby a little ‘attaboy‘ (or ‘attagirl‘).

Now don’t get me wrong I love the compliment, but this is another prime example of why I dislike email support. Maybe I should change my signature to say “Mr. Shelby” that might help sort out the confusion surrounding my name … then again knowing how most people don’t fully read responses to emails (myself included) it probably would not be all that effective.

WordPress Theme Destruction

Shelby — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 08:46:10 +0000

In my attempts to fix my theme, it seems that I have destroyed it. As you can see the font sizes are way off, and really I am unsure why… seeing that I didn’t change any of the CSS on the page. Guess this is more motivation to get the new theme out, though I am really not sure its ready for production yet since I just started creating it about 3 days ago, and really only spent about 15 minutes working on it.

Happy Turkey Day

Shelby — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:42:08 +0000

It would be much better if I was not having to work all days surrounding and including it, but what can you do. I had a chance to watch Planet Terror today and I really liked it, I thought it was somewhat better that Death Proof but overall they were both good.Â While watching Planet Terror I was very surprised to see that Stacey Ferguson was actually attractive in the movie.Â
Usually I don’t think that she looks all that good, but as you can see by this screen grab she actually looks alright. I plan on getting in some more movie watching this weekend while working on some side projects that I have lined up.Â It was also brought to my attention that I cant have a WoW day anymore since Entensity.net already does so and I might add they do it much better than I will ever be able to do. So back to the drawing board for a Wednesday posting theme.

As promised ….

Shelby — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:08:23 +0000

I never got around to updating my site. I really need to stick to that promise sometime. Maybe after I start night shift next week, then I will have some free time during the day to get some stuff done with out any distractions…. well then again I will prob. watch a copious amount of TV and who knows how many movies. Along with a redesign of the site I have been thinking of trying to really get into the daily posting that I was so used to ages ago. I was trying to think of things that I could post on certain days and here is what I came up with.

Monday – Weekend review. Not that many will be interested in this but I figured I should at least try to recap my weekends so I can have some of an idea of what I did years down the road.
Tuesday – Tech Tuesday, looking at posting some tech related article/how-to etc on every tuesday.
Wednesday – Whack off Wednesday. I am not going to start posting porn, but I think a tasteful photo every week wont hurt.
Thursday – Thirsty Thursday, coming from Lansing that was a tradition. I am going to try to post a drink mixture, drinking game, or some sort of review of a club/bar
Friday – Weekend Plan, then I can see on Monday if I really held to my plans.
Saturday – Nothing planned.
Sunday – Nothing planned.

Well there you have it, just one more thing that I wont stick to… but the idea is there at least.

WordPress Upgrade and what nots

Shelby — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 04:49:09 +0000

So I think that this weekend I am finally going to get my act together and upgrade my WordPress install, along with putting out my newer design.Â I am hoping that the new things I am putting in place will help boost my Pagerank and allow for better SEO.Â I have noticed that a lot of people are coming to my site as of late all because of a post I made a while back about good old Jessica Biel.Â So to keep up with that I figured I would post another to make everyone happy.

New Plugin

Shelby — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 21:29:17 +0000

I just installed a new plugin that should make the code posted here display worlds better…. too bad I dont really post that much code though.

< ?php echo "hello world"; ?>

Just wanted to test it out.

Hello Weekend…

Shelby — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:54:17 +0000

I cant wait for the day to be over… I think a new site design is right around the corner too, even more basic but with only css in place… or a lot of graphics I am still deciding.

SQL Test

Shelby — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 10:21:35 +0000

Just testing to make sure everything is still working …. after all I just nuked my Database by mistake.

1hr to go

Shelby — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:52:38 +0000

And I am really tired.Â I almost want to make some coffee… but then I will be up forever, unless I start drinking when I get home …. hmm ideas.Â Anyways this is a temp theme until I get around to creating a new one myself.

Gallery Sell-out

Shelby — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:14:42 +0000

So I finally made the jump and have moved my gallery over to Flickr.Â Go ahead and check it out, I am hoping it was a wise move…. at least from a disk space stand point its not that bad of an idea.

Improved Site Speed

Shelby — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 23:27:24 +0000

I have been in a constant battle with Vanessa about who’s site loads faster than who’s. The testing I have done was via websiteoptimization.com, and from their results I was smoking her on the speed of loading. I then decided to see how much I could optimize mine, and here are the results.

Orignal

Total HTTP Requests: 6
Total Size: 36274 bytes
14.4K – 29.31 seconds
28.8K – 15.26 seconds
33.6K – 13.25 seconds
56K – 8.43 seconds
ISDN 128K – 3.41 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps – 1.39 seconds

Optimized Site

Total HTTP Requests: 4
Total Size: 21452 bytes
Load Speed
14.4K – 17.43 seconds
28.8K – 9.11 seconds
33.6K – 7.93 seconds
56K – 5.08 seconds
ISDN 128K – 2.11 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps – 0.91 seconds

As you can see by removing some excess code, and some unused plugins it improved the loading of the site and the over all size as well. I am sure there is still much more that I can do to get a faster response, but this is good enough for now…. And should keep Vanessa at bay.