The Blog Plan

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This is about as close as I'm gonna come to a new year's resolution this year. I'm going to attempt to post here a little more often -- hopefully in the post-a-week range. I'm not entirely sure what I'll post about, but the general idea is I'd like to work a little harder to build some content. I won't promise that every post will be all that interesting (and the bulk of them might not be) but if I force myself to show something each week, I might learn something. So that's the plan. Oh, by the way we've got a pile of posts about our recently completed trip to Barcelona over at minor agenda. Go check 'em out!

Blogging in the New Year

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Well I've had a hard time coming back to this blog, but I think it is more than time that I made a return to actually blogging some content here. So expect to see more of that sort of thing in the new year. I'll chat a bit more about what I plan to do with the blog in the new year, but essentially what I'm planning on doing is to start ensuring that there's an update at least once a week. I'm hoping that by doing so I'll force myself to get off the couch when I get home in the evenings and actually do something more times than not. In the meantime, I've updated the blog with a new theme that does a bit more of using the new wordpress features.

Changing Paradigms

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I've let this blog sit around a little more than I would've liked. I'm trying to figure out how I should manage my online identity -- I have too many accounts at too many sites, and I want to see if I can simplify my online existence a little bit. One of my biggest issues has been how to handle the photos I share with the world. Up to this point, I've been using my Flickr gallery as a photoblog - usually posting one photo a day. There's some good reasons to do that - I get to share the absolute best photos I take at a relatively leisurely rate. That, and people can view my stream of photos as I post them without having to spend a lot of time sifting through a giant pile of photos if I posted them all at once.

There are downsides though. Sometimes I want to share photos that I've just taken, but there's a large backlog of photos from other recent photo shoots. So either I break chronological order, or I post them in order and the new photo gets shared weeks or months after I originally took it. Or, sometimes I'd like to link to a photo to a blog post that I'm making, but I haven't posted it yet. So I can either post it somewhere else first and then fix the link later once I post it, or I just post it out of order. Not pretty.

What I've decided to do is to use my Flickr account in a more conventional way -- post photos I shoot en masse and not worrying quite as much about keeping the quality of the stream as top notch as I have been. From there I can select my favorite photos and publish them on my blog. This has the added advantage that I can post "into the future", which means I can do a batch of photoblog posts and people reading my feed will get a photo a day.

This also means I can refine how I post photos to minoragenda.com. Instead of relying on yet another service to post albums of photos I take, I can use the Slickr plugin to wordpress to show off Flickr photosets in a nice fashion. This solves a bunch of problems I was trying to solve in a pretty nice way.

I'm going to be spending the next couple of days back-posting all my flickr photos. If you're subscribed to my RSS feed, you might see some odd artifacts of this while I'm doing it. Sorry about that, I'm not too sure if there's a way to avoid this problem.

Heraldk

Transition complete

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Just a couple of notes to update what I'm doing with the site. I have now removed the old layout and blog content for http://heraldk.ca/blog. That address is still valid, but it points to this blog. Wordpress does a pretty good job of acting as the main page for a website, so I see no reason to keep wordpress sequestered in a /blog directory. Very little for this webpage has changed. I hope to spend some time on the template to make it look prettier. Instead of doing it myself this time, I think I'll probably steal/use one of the free ones from the wordpress templates site and modify it using my own images. Hopefully I get around to that sooner rather than later.

Heraldk

Merge

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Times have been a little rocky for this blog. I'm trying to get it all under control, but it's taking me some time, and time is in high demand these days. A lot of the changes have been made to merge the two blogs, but I haven't had time to complete all the changes. As you can plainly see, my blog design needs a bunch of work, but that will come with time. In the interim, I hope to start posting regularly again about whatever comes to mind. Hopefully my blog can make a speedy recovery!

Please let me know if you see odd things happening with the blog - it'd help me out tremendously.

Heraldk

Times are Busy

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So... I launch a brand new blog, and then let both my blogs wallow in un-updatedness. Yeah, I'm good at this! As you might be able to tell, this site's layout is only half complete. It seems that everytime I get the chance to sit down to work on it, I get interrupted after only figuring out how to style one element at a time. At least now you can kind of see the direction I'm heading in. I hope you like it - I'm going for a fairly simple white background theme. It's fairly minimalist, but I think it'll do well. If the layout works out well, I'll probably adapt it for my personal blog as well.

Once the layout is done, I'll go back to trying to write some actual content for the blog. Hopefully that isn't too far away!

Heraldk

The New heraldk.ca

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Welcome! I have decided that it is more than time to put some work into this website again. As part of this work, I'm re-introducing the root level heraldk.ca as a new blog-style format. In it, I'll be posting my rants and thoughts about things. At first, it'll probably be fairly sparse, but I will fill it in over time (hopefully fairly frequently) with my latest rants. I hope the quality will improve over time and that you find some use out of it.

One of the reasons for this is I want to make a distinction between my personal diary style blog entries and some of the more content heavy posts. As well, I want to keep this blog free of poker related content so that I can once again serve up some google ads. The reason they've been lacking is because the policy for google ads does not allow you to place ads on sites with gambling related content. By separating these, I can keep this content separate -- plus many of my random readers probably don't really care that I won $25 in my most recent session of poker.

So I hope you enjoy my new site, and the forthcoming new look for both heraldk.ca and my personal blog.

Heraldk

Poker Bankroll Info

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I've created a new page (accessible from the top right menu, or here) that summarizes how my poker and online casino bonuses have gone over the last couple of years of playing. It is starting to look like a fairly impressive set of numbers, if I do say so myself! The particularly cool thing about these numbers is that my win rate at poker has skyrocketed in the last couple of months since I started playing no limit. No limit has totally been good to me - and I'm very happy to have made the switch (and so is my bottom line!).

Heraldk

Updates

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I'm continuing the improvements to this blog more slowly now, but I still intend on fixing stuff up. Today's update includes the re-introduction of Pages -- which will be used to show content that doesn't really fit into the blog style. Most importantly, these are pages that will contain data that people might be more interested in at a static moment in time. So I'll use these pages for stuff like: longer articles that might be of interest longer than a blog entry, as well as stuff like my resume and my list of publications. Hopefully these can grow as I continue to contribute to this blog! The menu to the upper right that displays the pages actually took me a frustratingly long time to make, and it still doesn't display properly in IE 7. Ugh. However, it does work in the browsers I have to test with, so hopefully it looks okay. Let me know if you have problems with it. It isn't perfect, but I'll try tweaking it later when I'm less frustrated with it!

Heraldk

New Blog Theme

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There's still some kinks to be worked out, but the main functionality for the template is now in place. Let me know what you think! Like it? Don't like it? Either way, I'd like your opinion. Note that I have only tested this design in firefox in linux. I'm going to try and test it with IE7 and firefox on windows when I get home tonight - hopefully it works alright on those. If you see weird things happening in other browsers, please let me know - I will do my best to fix up any weird stuff. There'll be some tweaks going on over the next couple weeks, but most of the important elements are already finished.

Hope you enjoy the new design! Heraldk

This blog, and other stories

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This goes out to my readers. I'm gonna try really hard to keep posting here more often. If the last post was more than a day or two ago, please leave a comment somewhere pinging me about it. I totally want to post more often, and am sure I've left out some important events in recent days since I haven't really been posting here all that regularly. That is, if you really find this blog all that interesting! Herald

Server move complete!

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Well it's done and everything seems to have moved fairly smoothly. If you notice any issues, please let me know because they aren't immediately obvious to me. This move signals the first time I pay for web hosting for my blog/website. This is made possible via a really cool webhosting company called nearlyfreespeech that lets you run your website for what seems like really really cheap. Their hole philosophy is very agreeable and if you are looking for a place to host a site, I recommend checking them out!

As a result of starting to pay for webhosting, you may see the return of google ads in more prominent spaces. I'm not certain that I'll do that just yet, but be forwarned. If they do return, I'd appreciate a few clicks since a regular google ad income should *easily* pay for the hosting fees.

And that's all from me for now. Back to my thesis!

Heraldk

DNS Updates

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I'm moving my webpage and blog (again)! This time there isn't anything you have to do. The urls should just work like before, but my blog is going to experience some downtime as I get ready for the transfer. Just so you know, you'll probably have a couple of days where you can't read my ever so exciting blog! But never fear, I will be back!

See you in a little while.

Heraldk