As I Xi It

When I was changing the the blog name to As I Xi It 2.0, I started to wonder if perhaps it should be 2.3. It’s not exactly a major change like from my old photoblog to this, all I’ve done is changed the theme.

Hmn… I guess I’ll be changing the name again then. If you have any objections, leave it in the comments.

Most people tend to think one should make changes in the New Year. If you intend to change or improve on something, why not just do it there and then when you think about it? What’s the point in waiting for the calendar to tick over to January? Surely it makes more sense that in this fast paced modern world that we should make changes and improvements as and when we conjure them up?

I for one will be making changes to the blog now, in December, before Christmas which I guess traditionally is when everything winds down. Well, work wise it does. Offices shut for the holidays, things slow down and its work as normal come after New Year where everyone will be making their resolutions.

Site updates includes, more obviously, the new theme! For the more observant of you, I’ve renamed As I Xi It…Again to As I Xi It 2.0 for more techiness. I’ve included a screenshot taken from my netbook of the old site below for nostalgia and archival purposes.

I used to use Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam plug-in with my WordPress blog, but when I tried to upgrade WordPress, it messed up the plug-in. So I stopped using it and then upgraded that when it was available and it was still messed up. In the end, I quit using it altogether and now use reCAPTCHA.

The concept’s more or less the same, it shows a word which is obscurified (sp?!) and you’ve got to type it into the box for your comment to be accepted on the blog. If you get it right, you get a cookie. Only kidding, in both the edible and computer type. What I ment to say was that if you get it right, your comment gets accepted.

reCAPTCHA looks the business and does the job. No complaints here. I quite like how you can change the way it looks.

I decided to change my WP theme from Desk Mess, which I’d modified having some of my own belongings draped around the “desk”, after less than a month. I quite liked it to start with, but got bored of it fairly quickly, also, Jac changed her blog theme recently so I thought I’d follow suite. Sheep mentality.

This new stripey theme’s quite neat I reckon, but perhaps a little pink some might find. I think I might get a skin designed for my netbook (should I take the plunge) based on these stripes. I got the theme from Design Disease.

For nostalgia purposes, I’ve stuck in a screenshot of the old theme.

Having just renewed my domain, I’ve come to realise that this website is 3 years old today.

Over the years its undergone many guises from some sort of online photoalbum, site about stuff, blog, photoblog and now a blog-based website which kinda includes all of the above. The photoblog is still about and viewable if you click on As I Xi It (2007-2008) in the links section.

Happy birthday xiyuonline.com.

I was fiddling around with my site while I was at work and all was fine with xiyuonline.com, when I got home in the evening, my site had disappeared! Turned out that I forgot to renew my domain. Anyway, since my domain was only expired for a few hours, I dropped a message to those people at Big Wet Fish, paid my subscrption and all is well again. They replied to my message really quickly, as in within 30 minutes at 10-something pm at night!! Kudos to them, there’s no substitute for quality customer service. In the first year that I had my account with them, they sent me a Christmas card, but they haven’t done so since. It’s just as well, I don’t see the point of Christmas cards, a waste of resources. Think of the trees!!

It would’ve been a real pisser if all the data had been deleted and I had to upload and set everything up all over again. All that fiddling and tweaking the past few days would’ve been lost in some big webbie hole somewhere.

I’ve added a “Portfolio” page where you can see a selection of my favourite pics, it was made using the NextGEN Gallery plug-in for WordPress. It’s simple but neat.

I’ve got no major plans for this blog, I suppose this time round it’ll be a bit of a mixed bag.

Nothing much interesting to report here.

Zzzz….

Well, I upgraded WordPress and my chosen photoblog plug-in (YAPB) decided that it didn’t want to work anymore. So I upgraded to the latest version of the plug-in and it gave me a fatal error. I couldn’t be bothered to faff about figuring what was wrong so I thought I’d just start afresh.

Watch this space for further developments.