5 Years

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 @ 10:05pm

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve had this blog for 5 years now. Of course it’s gone from “Jason’s Thoughts” to “Let’s See Jason’s Photos!”, but I guess that’s okay. What are some of these things that have happened in these past 5 years?

  • 274 blog posts
  • 253 photos posted to flickr
  • Graduated from college
  • Ran over by a car
  • Learned many new instruments
  • Almost 80,000 page views since Jan. 2009
  • (finally) visited the pacific ocean
  • Hit a hole-in-one
  • Bought a motorcycle
  • Bought a house

I still have a lot of goals in life to accomplish, a lot of things unfinished – but with whatever happens I’ll be sure to post it here. I’ve laughed, loved, and have been broken. I’ve tried to experience life to its fullest and want to say, give it your best shot; I can take it! I’m not done yet and I don’t plan on giving up. Thanks for putting up with me for 5 years, and here’s for more to come!

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Blog: From Drupal to WordPress

Thursday, February 25th, 2010 @ 5:37pm

You shouldn’t notice any major changes on the front end other than a few minor enhancements, but I’ve switched over from Drupal 6.9 to WordPress 2.9. When I first moved to Drupal from Coranto a little over one year ago I quickly mashed together a template. This move has allowed me to completely re-write the site to make it cleaner overall.

The major things that you should know is that my rss feed has moved from /rss.xml to /feed. The old link will still work, but I recommend you update it just in case. A few old links may be missing here and there, but all posts, pages, and comments have been moved over from Drupal. If you encounter any other weird issues, please leave a comment.

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Migration

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 @ 2:48pm

Just a short notification. My host will be shifting servers around sometime tomorrow so there may be a small period of downtime both here and at scurker.com. I don’t foresee any major issues, but should anything adverse happen you have been forewarned.

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New Portfolio

Thursday, January 21st, 2010 @ 8:10pm

A few days ago I revamped and relaunched my portfolio. The new site is now built upon WordPress and should help expand the type of content I put on the site. The new launch also includes a blog which will be completely separate from this blog. For friends & family, don’t worry; this blog is sticking around. I’ll be able to post about mumbo-jumbo like “jquery, javascript, css, php” over on my portfolio’s blog while keeping this one on things I find purely interesting (and non portfolio related).

If you have any remote interest in web design, or the things I post over on my portfolio, please feel free to add my portfolio’s feed to your favorite RSS reader.

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iPhone/Mobile View

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 @ 3:47pm

Jason's Blog on iPhoneI’m probably the only one who would actually access my blog on an iPhone, but I’ve just now pushed out a design that should be better suited for mobile devices. I’ve optimized the design obviously for the iPhone/iPod, but it should work on other mobile devices like the PSP, DSi, or Android (fingers crossed).

Pretty much the only thing you should see is the header menu, the main content area (blog posts, archives, main content, etc.), and the footer. The sidebar and random quotes were removed due to lack of sufficient space. If you see anything in addition to that, it means something isn’t working as it should.

If you have a different mobile device *cough*guy*cough* and are willing to give it a go, please let me know. If the page doesn’t fit right or something just looks strange, please leave a comment here and any images that you can provide to see if I can’t fix it. Any other ideas or suggestions that might help will be considered as well.

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The Problem with Social Networks

Monday, March 23rd, 2009 @ 11:18am

Ever since the dawn of social networks, I have always been hesitant to join the fray. When Facebook first came about, I resisted for as long as possible to join in. Eventually I saw some value in Facebook, and finally created an account. A similar situation occurred with Twitter, but I was able to some value in using Twitter and hesitantly tagged along.

Social networking does have some value and purpose, but one of the things that concerns me greatly is how easily information is released, and the questionable privacy loss that occurs when information is placed in the social network’s hand. It begs the question, “How safe is my information?” One of the key reasons why I host my own blog is because I feel it is very important that I hold the key to my information and decide how and when information is released. When I allow my information to be handled by someone else, I lose that privilege and stand a great risk to my privacy. Even still while I control the information on this blog, I am still very cautious in what personal information I post since the information is available freely to anyone.

This is why I try to limit the amount of information that is available on social networking, and I highly recommend others to do the same. I feel some sense of humanity is lost since so much information is available so freely and released with no regards of the consequences. I must admit, I do not have anything to hide but rather feel that certain freedoms of an individual are being violated or forgotten in this age of freely available information.

I don’t have anything against social networks outside of that, and I find both Facebook and Twitter to be great tools for communication and keeping in contact with people. My word of caution is just be careful in the information is released, because they’re no guarantee that the information will remain safe.

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Captchas

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 @ 1:30pm

Unfortunately with the way technology is advancing these days, captchas are a necessary evil when anonymous user input on a site is implemented. On my old blog, I used captchas for anonymous comments to reduce the spam I was getting, but I figure when moving to a new location I could get away with no captchas. Unfortunately, this utopia only lasted for 4 weeks before I started to get spam comments on my blog, so I am now forced to implement captchas for anonymous comments again. If you don’t like captchas you can register a username so you never have to worry about it, otherwise you will need to enter a captcha for every anonymous comment you make. Sorry!

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Downtime

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 @ 6:03pm

Sorry for the slight downtime today, but I was having a ton of errors happening with both Drupal and MySQL and basically had to start from scratch. Thankfully, I had everything backed up and I got the mysql database moved to a new server. As a result of that everything should be much faster, and if you were seeing any timeouts or blank pages you shouldn’t be seeing them anymore.

I’m going to slowly be re-adding the sidebar content tomorrow, but in the meantime all of my blog posts are back up and intact. Carry on!

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Welcome!

Sunday, January 25th, 2009 @ 7:28pm

You’re here either because I redirected you from my old blog location (blog.simgaming.net), I asked you to come here, or you just randomly happened to stumble upon this blog. Please update your bookmarks if you came from the old location to this new location, as my former location will be nixed in the near future. There’s been some major changes to the site, but underneath all of that you still have the same old blog. But let me briefly introduce you to the changes that have been made.

Firstly, the whole system is powered by Drupal, a PHP based content management system. As much as I loved Corento, I feel it was time to move on as some of the features of that system were somewhat limiting without some drastic changes being made at the core. Switching to drupal gives me the potential to plug in some interesting modules that can do lots of cool stuff.

One of the new features in place, is the new tagging system. I can tag posts with any number of tags and help categorize them for a later date. If you want to see all the videos or comics I have posted, or any blog posts relating to school, you can now do so. I’m really excited about this and am glad I am able to finally categorize my posts.

Additionally, there is a new comment system in place, which unfortunately means all previous comments are now lost and you will need to create a new account here in order to post comments. I really want to know what everyone thinks of the new site so please register and leave your thoughts!

For now, the site is very basic but I have some neat things planned for the site such as Twitter integration and other modules eventually. With the new system in place, it should be easier for me to post so I promise I will try and keep you more informed about what’s going on or what I find interesting.

I’m still in the process of moving everything else over (projects, about) but it will come with time. Additionally, if you were keeping updated via RSS you will need to point your reader to blog.scurker.com/rss.xml in order to stay up to date with any new posts.

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What’s new?

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 @ 9:19pm

Sorry for the drought, but I haven’t had anything really exciting happen in the past month or so. But its a new year now and time for new opportunities!

Expect some changes here sometime during the next few months. I’ve been tied to Coranto ever since this blog’s incarnation and I feel its time to move on. I’m kind of limited in the things that I can do and I want a little more flexibility in management so I’m going to start researching some other CMS packages that are available out there. In addition to that, I feel that since SimGaming.net no longer has relevance I should move the blog to something more permanent, like blog.scurker.com. A redesign is probably in the works as well since this design is beginning to become narrow with the higher resolutions of monitors.

In the meantime, I will shortly be headed for Salt Lake City for snowboarding so I’ll be sure to post pictures and any interesting stories, until then…

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