Hello everyone,

Today I am pleased to announce the first part of my new blog and personal website transition. As you can see, Masked Media.com is no longer the domain name for the blog. I decided to go ahead and purchase drwatz0n.com (along with another domain name), so I can free up MM.com for another project I am working on. So, welcome to the two year anniversary month of the blog (in a few hours, at least). My plans for this month are quite big, to be honest. I hope to design a whole new theme for the blog (though the current one is nice), release the first public version of Town Hall, and much more. Once school finishes up (last day of classes is on the 15th of June, and exams last for another week after), I will have some more time to devote to web stuff, and I hope to announce a new website launch in the coming weeks that will, maybe, get off the ground this time.

Anyway, enjoy the new domain name. Any URL’s from the old blog work, you just need to change the root domain name from “http://www.maskedmedia.com” to “http://www.drwatz0n.com”.

Ah… what a nice Memorial Day. The weather couldn’t have been better: 70′s, sunny, not a cloud in the sky from lunchtime on. Unfortunately, the only time I was outside today was for the Memorial Day parade/ceremony (for which I had to play in the band), seeing as though the rest of my afternoon was dedicated to my term paper for English 11, which, despite sitting in front of a computer for six hours, is still a page and a half away from completion, plus the works cited page. I’ll get around to finishing it later, though. After all, it’s not due for another twelve hours!

Anyway, over the course of last night (well, early morning) and this afternoon, I modified the blog theme a bit. As you can see, I changed the theme a few days ago from the dark gray theme I used to have to this brighter, at times pink, theme. But, I got rid of most of the pink by editing some images and CSS. I also integrated my Twitter feed into the sidebar and cleaned up the pages that used to populate the header. Seeing as though the last time I edited the “Songs” page was in August of 2008, I decided to mark that as hidden, along with the “Game Maker Chart” page and my lacking “Web Design Portfolio”. You can probably expect a few, but not all, of these pages to come back in the coming weeks and months in a new and revamped form.

I also took to a task I had been meaning to deal with for over a year now: cleaning up the server. I’m going to be frank: I’m messy and I don’t clean up when I’m done with things. As such, the entire root directory of the server was cluttered with over 25 folders, a ton of files, and a whole load of crap totaling almost 1000MB. Just so you know, I only have a 1GB hosting account, so I was getting pretty close to exceeding my limit on that front. Also, I had 22 (out of 60) sub-domains and all five MySQL databases used. So, things were getting pretty out of control. And to top it all off, the last time I made a global backup of the entire server was back in the beginning of January, so that was so out of date it wasn’t even funny.

So, I opened up the cPanel File Manager (FTP is way to slow when dealing with deleting files and entire directories), and one by one I deleted everything that wasn’t being used any more/worthless. That included the old Masked Media Weblog (formerly located here). Why did I delete a piece of history? Well, to start off, it wasn’t deleted entirely, only WordPress was. I made a backup of the entire database (which contained the files for over ten blogs, though this blog is stored in a separate database), so I still have all of the posts and comments if I ever decide to open up an “Archive” section on this site (for other blogs/projects). Also among the casualties of my red delete button were the old Town Hall revisions and builds (builds 5-7, and Alphas 1-1.2), LinkShare, my old Chyrp mini-blog, and the old Masked Media project stage. All in all, I was able to cut down my 1000MB of used space to 350MB, the 22 used sub-domains down to nine, and all five databases down to just two. All in all, it was a productive day on the server and blog front.

Just as a notice, in less than one month the blog will be turning two years old. This is quite a milestone, seeing as though there have only been three months out of the 24 that I failed to post anything. Yes, a project of mine lasting more than a few months is great! I plan on writing a few retrospects (that I originally planned to be released on New Years but never finished), describing a few things that have happened since I set up the blog (the day I moved out of my old house and basically changed my life), along with, yes, maybe, a new design that I actually designed myself! Who knows, we’ll have to wait and see. But, I must leave you now, seeing as though I have to go finish my term paper.

Hey,

I know it’s been a while since I made a “real” blog post, aka one that isn’t reviewing software or posting rumors of new products (though my information on the Airport Express and Time Capsule updates was correct). But, that’s going to change. Well, maybe not this week, but soon.

So, we have a problem. The issue is that traffic to the blog has been steadily decreasing, which isn’t cool. As such, I plan on advertising the blog in many places in the coming weeks in an attempt to draw people in. Secondly, I promise to make more posts here, instead of the two or three a month pattern I’ve been on so far this year. Finally, I plan on creating a few, once-a-week posts for various things. The first, launching today (though it will normally be on Mondays), is called “Stranger Danger”, in which I will post one chat log from Omegle.com, a site that allows you to chat with a random stranger. It’s actually quite addicting.

So, I hope to turn things around and make this place a lot more active. You may have noticed I attempted to add a Facebook Connect commenting plugin, though I don’t know how well it works…

Well, I have decided to once again bring back the ‘Song of the Month’ feature that used to be displayed in the sidebar. But now, I am also including two other things: Word and Application. Anyway, things are going to change on here again. Well, maybe not the theme, but in terms of content (the location of content (read: categories)), and various pages that haven’t been updated in a hell of a long time.