I just got notifications that all my domains were successfully transferred to my new registrar. I’m now using DynaDot which is a vocal opponent of SOPA. The reason I transferred was partially to promote anti-SOPA messages and also for privacy reasons. Hopefully I’ll be much happier with my new service.

Check out the video below for information about PIPA/SOPA and why you should join the fight to oppose these proposed laws.

• custom backgrounds and headers
• shortlinks
• menus (no more file editing)
• post types
• taxonomies
• long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress

It also includes a new default theme called Twenty Ten. It looks pretty sexy.

Hopefully I’ll get to upgrade everything soon.

Plugins: Now, WordPress is notorious for it’s plugin support, and this isn’t news to me. I’ve had several different plugins installed from day 1, but I’ve recently found some cool new ones. Particularly akismet, a spam control plugin, Counterize, a stats plugin, and most of all, Widgets. Wigets are pretty sweet, more on that later.

Akismet is a pretty big plugin to control spam in the comments. I’ve been getting a lot of bot-spam on the site lately. Some days, I would get 2 or 3 notifications about comments posted to the site. Invariably, I knew they were all spam, but I would have to visit the site to delete them. Bummer. While akismet is included with the WordPress install, I never activated it. I’m glad I did though. It has caught everything so far.

Counterize is a tiny plugin which keeps track of visitor statistics. You know… hits, pages viewed and referrers. The usual stuff. I had tried to get an AWStats plugin working, but because of the way this host is setup, I couldn’t get it working. Oh well… I like Counterize because it incorporates with WordPress very nicely, and I can see all the site stats from the Admin panel.

Widgets: These things are really cool. By recoding my sidebar slightly, and enabling the Widgets, I can now move the sidebar sections around super-easy. There is an interface in the admin panel which lets me drag-and-drop the sections where ever I want. I can also modify their contents on the fly, add new sections and incorporate cool WordPress features I didn’t know existed.

Needless to say, I’ve been making slight improvements to the site over the past few days. I also created a “Projects” section. This will be home to information about the Java projects I have worked on for class. They were pretty big, so I want to be able to document them online.

I will also develop a few new header images, which will be larger, to offset the expanded width of the screen. While browsing around the internet, I notice blogs usually have oversized header images which fill a majority of the screen. I don’t want to feel out of place, so I’ll orchestrate a cocoughany of larger images to fill the newly voided space at the top of the site.

P.S. I just heard the awesomest ringtone ever!! Some lowly paper-jockey came in today to help file, and his phone rang… Super Mario Brothers theme. It was friggin’ sweet! That just made my day.

What I’ve really been looking for is a gallery plug-in. I found a few that add images to blog posts, but I want on that will manage images on blog pages. Hmmm…. Nothing specific yet, but I did find one to use with Gallery2

Oh yeah. I also paid for ad removal from my host, so I’ll be taking down the ads pretty soon. I also get moved to a better server, where there (hopefully) won’t be any downtime. I’m thinking about buying a domain too… We’ll see.

Lots of work happening right now. I also bought her a Christmas present today. I hope she likes it.

I’ve added content in the Design, Scripts and About sections of the site. To see the new stuff, check out the navigation menu at the top.

I’ll be adding a shoutbox to the site soon, so look for that to show up soon.

As for all the other sites, they are still fully functional and are hosted on Brinkster servers. Brinkster was my old host before I switched to x10hosting. Hopefully I’ll remember to keep that old account active so they don’t delete my stuff.

History lesson : It all started when I was teaching a HTML course at a summer camp in 1999. The students needed a example to see, so I whipped up an old, very dark, www.the8thdimension.com. That site, as I said, doesn’t exist anymore, but it was later transferred to a new host and redesigned.

I kept that site for about a year, after which I was employed by a friend to create a website for his new business. Well, his business never made it off the ground and I was stuck with an empty layout. I decided to sell my design services and created Xidell Systems. That gradually changed from a entrapenurial site to a whatever-the-hell-I-felt-like site.

Of course Xidell Systems is an odd name for a personal site, so I redesigned it to Eightcubed. You can search the sites for what that means, but I kept that moniker for a while. It lasted through 3 designs.

There was then a Version 2 which I developed and relied heavily upon ASP to do so. The layout is based off another site I had seen on the web, and liked. That design was a success and I kept that site the longest.

Eventually, I thought I wanted to redesign the site so I made a couple layouts that flopped as replacements but one I decided to keep and jointly maintain as a blog of mine. That would be Eightcubed Blog. :-0 That started out as a soapbox, turned into a wailing wall, then finally into a normal this-is-stuff-I-care-about blog.

I inevitably got tired of that and realized that I was in need of a new host. Brinkster was good, but didn’t have PHP(without paying for it). And I really wanted to start developing in PHP. I stumbled across x10hosting and found my savior. The site you are currently looking at was created completely from scratch and designed and coded by myself. I decided to try a themed website with a blog system incorporated into it. I settled on WordPress and got to modifying the existing code into a WP Theme. So, the end result is what you are looking at. WordPress wrapped in a custom theme. I doubt all the bugs are worked out, so it may be a little bit before it’s perfect, but hey! WHO CARES!?!

Oh, P.S. I was doing a little late night browsing yesterday and stumbled across some pretty nifty stuff:

Macquarium Fun!
Not Pr0n Puzzle