I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Don’t know why I did, it’s not like the old WordPress (1.5.1) was giving me problems… I just felt like making everything joyous for the new year.

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.

Well, after about a month of downtime, my website is back up. Through inactivity timers, server wipes, manual account creations and lost passwords the site has survived.

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

I’ve been making small tweaks to the site lately.

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.

I’ve added to a few of the sections on the site. The Design section of the site has taken the most abuse. I decided to put up a history of my web development career, which is a first. There is one site I created before anything that is listed there, it was the original www.the8thdimension.com but I lost the files when I switched site hosts, so that design is lost in oblivion.

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

Well, I’ve been working on debugging this blog for a few days now, and I think I finally got everything resolved. The biggest problem was with trackbacks and pingbacks. For some reason my site wasn’t sending trackbacks or pingbacks but was able to recieve them.

After much deliberation and a clean upgrade of WordPress, I finally got it working. (**I think**). Let’s hope everything is in order now. I actually reinstalled WordPress, so there may be a few bugs that I don’t know about for a little while.

In the meantime, I found some nifty websites that helped me figure out this backtrack/pingback stuff. If you’re having trouble with your blog in these areas, check out these websites:

http://redalt.com/External/pingomation.php
( A site for testing incoming/outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks. This one is nice because it shows you the debugging XML. )

http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/TestTrack/
( A test blog, where you can make your own posts and see how your trackbacks work on another blog. )

http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/
( A nice site for sending trackbacks manually. You can use this to send a trackback to another site if your trackbacks aren’t working. )

http://www.aylwardfamily.com/content/tbping.asp
( Similar to the site listed above. Shows you the debug XML afterwards. )

I have been hard at work on the new layout. It’s taking a lot longer than I thought it would to get WordPress incorporated into this design. It’s just a big pain because I have to make a template out of the site layout I created and there are a number of files that I have to make work. And by work, I mean look good.

The server has been up and down lately, but from what I hear, this is very unusual and should pass soon.

I’ve also moved the Ad to the top of the site. It uses JavaScript to place the image, so when the page loads, it may not be in the right place at first, just wait till everything loads and it’ll move on it’s own.

If your interested in getting free website hosting, check out these sites:

• www.x10hosting.com – My current host.
• www.crystaltech.com – Free ASP.NET host.
• www.brinkster.com – My old host.