CalvinDude.com

Although it may not look like it, I’ve been doing tons of behind-the-scenes stuff to make the website as a whole “much more gooderer” both in content and functionality. The good news is that the foundation has been set. The bad news is that now I get to start coding stuff. And since it’s for the website, that means I’ll be dusting off the old PHP manual. But it’s fun at least.

Those of you who look at the main page of this website, as opposed to just going straight to the blog, will notice that I’ve revamped the CSS and updated it a bit to make the main page look more like it’s no longer stuck in 2003. My goal is also to eventually merge the blog contents into the main page contents too, to link similarly themed articles and blogs, and to program a fairly robust search algorithm for the contents. After all, I’m closing in on 800,000 words of text just in the blog section, and that means soon the blog will be longer than the Bible is! With that much data, there needs to be better ways of looking for something specific, since I don’t anticipate anyone other than me to read the entire contents of this blog :-)

Since it’s now July, I figured I’d update my blog. I didn’t update it earlier because I was sorta busy: took a vacation, which included me getting engaged (so it was obviously a much better vacation than the one you got), and just arrived back home to check my stats. After last month’s oddities, which resulted in me ending June with more than 2x more hits than the second highest month so far this year, July’s numbers are trending back toward just being slightly higher than usual. Still don’t know why the sudden bump in traffic, but I’m sure George W. Bush is to blame somewhere for something, so he might as well shoulder this blame too.

In any case, I look to be writing a little bit more than before on my personal blog in the upcoming days and weeks, although my schedule being what it is I make no promises (other than the promise that Bush will be blamed some more!).

So I was checking my stats on my website since I hadn’t looked in a while, and I discovered that for some reason June has been a very popular month for visits. I mean, it’s not like there’s really that much that I’ve added, yet somehow my number of hits has increased greatly starting from the 4th on, to a peak on the 14th.

How should I put this? Well, in that 10 day period, I had only 32,000 fewer hits than I had for March, April and May combined. In fact, just adding the hits from the 8th through the 10th (3 days) gives a number greater than what I got in May, and adding the 11th gives me greater than I got in April (since April eeked out 6,000 hits more than May got).

Anyway, checking where the majority of hits have been coming through doesn’t yield much info for me. The vast majority (76.98% of it) has been to the main page, with another 19.15% being listed as “Direct Request”. So I guess maybe someone out there’s just spamming the refresh button on my main page or something….

If I had to place money on it…I’m saying Bush did it.

Okay, I have now updated the database to make it work with more international characters, such as: λόγος

Since I had to manually update all the tables to get this to work, there may be bugs and glitches. If you find any, just leave a comment here on this post and I’ll look into when I can!

Since many of the old blog posts were done in ancient versions of WordPress (ancient being in terms of software age, where each day of existence is roughly equal to Methuselah’s life-span, in sort of really fast “dog years” calculation), lots of the old archive stuff had tons of junk characters in them that made it really difficult to read.

I have, hopefully, fixed all that now. Of course, I’m quite certain there are a few that I’ve missed, and I was guessing as to what some of the gibberish was supposed to mean (was that an open quote, or was it an em-dash?) But I believe they are all infinitely improved now. At least you should avoid a headache seeing all the random symbols now.

Those who tried to access the site earlier today (and probaby part of yesterday too) noticed that it was down for a bit. But since you’re now reading this, you already know it’s BACK!

I blame Bush.

BTW, anyone who tries to leave comments should be aware that there has been an upsurge in spam that I’ve been getting rid of. If I accidentally delete a relevant comment, I do apologize. If you don’t see a comment you make appear within three or four days, you can re-submit it.

Yeah, yeah. I know about the stupid “junk” symbols that occur now on the blog. This is because I upgraded WordPress. I just upgraded to the next version…and it’s still there :-(

Reminds me of reading e-mails sent from Juno back in the day. Anyway, I am looking into what I can do to fix it. Unfortunately, without home internet access, I won’t be able to do much for the near future. But when I can, I will! Honest.

If not…I blame Bush.

That’s right, earlier today this website was down! Thankfully, I was able to contact my my provider and get it fixed. Turns out that the automatic domain renewal didn’t “automate” for some reason.

But this brings up an important factoid. With the renewal of the domain, this means that CalvinDude.com has been existence for over two full years now!!! Much to the chagrin of atheists everywhere (especially John Loftus), we still exist to this day :-D

So happy birthday, website (the official “birth” date is April 8, for those keeping track…actually, for those keeping track, GET A LIFE, MAN!).