Finally… the blog has come back to Rachel’s Page. That is, it’s on my own server now, so yay. And with purely my own layout that is (or will be, in most cases) used on the rest of the site. The parts of the site that do have this layout don’t have the new banner yet, though. It’s actually an update of an old “Use this to link here” banner I’d made partially as a joke back in 2001, which is why Chris Jericho has so much hair, and why it’s so tacky. But the picture of me is recent (the previous one was from 1998), and had major lighting issues that I couldn’t fix, which is why it’s grayscale’d. That, and I guess it helps keep me stealthy compared to the rest.

Anyway, blog, new/old location. I think I still have a few kinks to work out, but for the most part, I guess it’s finally ready for a public debut. I had a nice little run on Blogspot, but I’m a control freak, so it just wasn’t sufficient for me. But on that note, if you’re using the custom RSS feed I mentioned last month, you shouldn’t have any problems with the transition. If not, then I guess this might be the last post you ever see, unless you take note of this and go to the new URL.

I haven’t been able to do much thought spewing lately, partially because I was busy setting up all this, but I definitely do have plenty to spew. For one, I still have that Lunar Navy thing, as well as things to say about TaXatioN, Hulk vs Mindfreak, Esmeraude, and the 13th Warrior/Monk/Thief/Red Mage/White Mage/Black Mage. At least one of which you might see within the next few minutes, because I didn’t want to come empty-handed.

For various reasons, I haven’t been able to do much writing for the past few days. (In fact, I really shouldn’t even be writing this.) But I have been doing a lot of reading.

I only recently learned about a big problem with XHTML — that it’s really just HTML pretending to be XHTML in most cases, including mine. Even though XHTML1 is virtually identical to HTML4 anyway, there’s no way I’m going backwards. It seems there aren’t really any particular technical disadvantages to using my fake XHTML, either. It works, and the W3C told me to do it, so why change?

Maybe because now there’s HTML5 to consider. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made a new feed for this blog at this address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/magikarp46blog

Why? Because BlogSpot’s default Atom feed is not functioning the way I need it to. It won’t even update in my own reader, among other things, and from the looks of it, there’s no reasonable way around these problems. So I looked up how to write a new feed from scratch. And, when/if I can move to a self-hosted blog, this will make the transition much easier. But I’ll also be doing what I can to make this little transition as easy as possible, too. Editing URLs, attempting redirects, etc.

I love learning to do new things like this, though. But more than that, I love writing code from scratch in text editors. It makes me feel alive. If it wasn’t freezing outside, and my ankles weren’t in severe pain at the moment, I’d go out and run a few miles to express my joy.