So the website’s been down for a few weeks now. I’m sure no one has noticed, as my updates have generally been sporadic at best, and it’s become quite the photo blog instead. Even Collin noticed.

Well, things at work have been getting kind of hectic, and a general feel of stagnancy with the look and the content just made me feel blah. I guess when you are not being stimulated creatively, professionally, or even individually, there’s just nothing to write about. But I digress about the current turn of events.

I decided to move to Dreamhost a month ago, after four years with my previous provider Mediacatch. They weren’t bad. They just were not suiting my needs. I found myself unable to find out my actual disk storage limits (their system showed me with an unlimited quota for 2 years), and their MySQL system was a bit archaic. The fact is, they were usually so low-maintenance that I forgot their name quite a number of times.

So following my impulsive tendencies, I decided to just up and switch everything over. I downloaded my server contents to a folder, and backed up my wordpress blog database into a 34MB mySQL file.

At the same time, I had just picked up “PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide” (Larry Ullman) to help expand my skill-set, and just for a hobby. This would be a great opportunity to play with code and stuff, and rebuild my geek credo.

I had been tinkering with a redesign for almost a year now for my blog, but could never settle with anything definite. Compared to years ago, where it was normal for me to churn out new looks and designs every six months. Such is designer’s block.

So in the whole moving process, I hit a snag with my wordpress backup. There is a bug in wordpress that was preventing me to import entries later than November 2006. I tested this out on my local installation of wordpress and MySQL (using MAMP), and until that gets resolved, I can’t import any posts from 2001-2007. Hopefully this will be resolved and everythign will be back up.

This current look took 4 hours to create visually. I used the whole of last night (8 hours) to integrate it into a working Wordpress theme. I used Textwrangler and CSSEdit to edit and test. I spent maybe an hour reading up and seeing if Coda could work for me in the future.

The look currently isn’t perfect. I shall have to troubleshoot slowly and fix as bugs come up.