Seriously, though, I’m paying for web hosting that’s just sitting here accumulating virtual dust, so I may as well do something with it. My current contract lasts until sometime in November, but I’m not entirely sure if I’ll renew it. Most likely, I’ll move to a WordPress.com account, or even a Tumblr. Then again, a free blog has its own drawbacks, including involuntary ads and limited customization. I suppose I’ll have to mull on that for a while.

Originally, I had great plans for this site. Custom-made websites! WordPress themes! Witty bantering about anything and everything! Then I realized that I didn’t quite have the time to make websites for people, nor do I know much about PHP (though I’m learning!), so I fell back on the ol’ ranting and raving. That was all well and good back then, but I’ve mellowed in my old age, so I’m not feeling the vitriolic vibe needed for properly lambasting the morons of the world.

So, I’ve decided to branch out for the short time this site is still around. Maybe I’ll post some technical tutorials or insights into my recent experiences in the programming world. Or maybe I’ll just post pictures of goofy-looking dogs in military uniforms.

Once I figure out what purpose this blog will serve, I’ll be sure to let everyone know. By writing a post. On this blog.

(That was smooth.)

Oh, and for pity’s sake, people, stop sending me stuff about Alex Jones. I’m sorry I ever mentioned the guy.

As a result of my new 40-hour week, I haven’t had much time to get on my blog and post stuff. This is unfortunate, but it’s happened before. Everyone hits a slump now and again. I figure I’m just too beat to get properly irritated at world events. Or maybe I’ve become jaded enough that I simply can’t get properly irritated? That would be disturbing.

For lack of anything better, here’s a video. It involves SCIENCE. Kind of.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Luckily, any pictures I used on the site are on my computer, but that just means I’ll have to re-upload them and fix any posts using images (such as the most recent post before this). And on the bright side, I can start anew without the clutter of useless themes and plugins. On the downside, I don’t remember what all the useful plugins were…

And yes, Bagel, I know I could have avoided this by just having a blog on WordPress.com, but I’m too stubborn for that. I just wish I had made better backups…

UPDATE: All right, I’ve got a new theme going, but I’m still missing a lot of stuff. And I still feel stupid. Argh. At least WP 2.5 is nice. It’s a good thing, too, considering the trouble I went through.

I wouldn’t recommend this method for major upgrades, but I suppose it’d work out just fine. I’ve used it for the past few minor updates and it’s been great. Less time spent using an FTP client and more time spent…uh…writing, I suppose. Maybe. Sometimes.

And yes, I know 242 views over 4-5 months is nothing, but it’s a lot for this blog. And if that’s not enough to wow you, I even got a comment from Morton Devonshire, the Wikipedia editor who got Jones all riled up a while back, which pushed me to write the article in the first place. How’s that for full circle, or whatever? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.

Anyways, please bear with me as I go through and categorize, tag, name, and cleanup all the imported posts. Permalinks may be broken for these old posts, so don’t go Digging them just yet. I only wish I knew why some of the later (more recent) ones are lacking names and links for the comments. Very odd.

Anyways, tags are cool. I’ve been using Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 for all my tagging needs but when I upgraded to WP 2.3, I decided to give the built-in tagging features a whirl. Of course, this entailed extensive modification of the theme to switch everyone over from UTW but things were made easier by a neat little tag importer that took all my tags from UTW and put them in the WordPress tagging table.

A few minutes of use almost sold me. It looked just as nice as UTW, and since I don’t use tag clouds, the features were good. However, I stopped short when I couldn’t find any kind of management for the tags. There is no (easy) way to add, delete, or modify tags other than going into the database or editing every post individually.

But this was just the tip of the iceberg. As I was writing this post, I began to get strange errors telling me that I was missing a table in my WordPress database. I couldn’t even save my post. Investigation led me to this support article. Apparently, the developers saw fit to completely rename three tables in the WordPress database, which means that many plugins and themes are using outdated code which will cause errors just like the ones I was getting. Now I’m forced to use the featureless WordPress tags because UTW is one of the incompatible plugins crashing my blog, as is the nifty AJAX archives plugin I had managing my archives page (which is now the boring old version until I can figure out what to do with it).

Alas, this isn’t a new thing with WordPress. It seems that every major upgrade brings with it major problems for existing installations. I’ll have my blog just perfect with everything all figured out. Then I upgrade and I can’t use half of it. That’s the price of staying on top of things, I suppose. I guess my biggest frustration is being forced to use the inadequate WordPress tagging feature, but plugin authors will probably catch up soon enough. I hope.

However, as time’s gone by, I’ve written less and less about myself. I kind of switched to writing about how I feel about more important stuff, which is what blogging is really more about. Writing all about yourself is either egotistic or whiny, depending on how you phrase things. The rants started probably around late 2005 or early 2006, but they were few and far between, and I wrote more and more about technical stuff: my experiences with Linux, games I liked, movies I’d watched, or, when I moved to my own hosting, about WordPress and other blogging platforms. (Yay for lame history lessons…moving on.)

Now, however, my posts are almost exclusively news and rants. Or both. By now you’re probably wondering what the point of this post is, considering I’ve gone on and on about what I write about. Anyways, I’m asking you, my readers, what you would prefer to see out of Mad Rants. In short: what do you expect from this blog?

This has become less and less a personal blog–and that’s not a bad thing–but I want to make sure that’s okay with my readers. One of the best things a blog can do for itself is write towards its audience. If Maddox started writing about fluffy kittens and DDR (in a non-sarcastic fashion), his readers would be pretty taken aback. Heck, they reacted bad enough when he pulled an April Fools’ prank.

The question I asked is optional. I half meant it, but I also half wanted to just write something to make it look like I’m doing something. I also half wanted to see how many people replied. And now I think I need to go work on my fractions. Kolleg iz lerning me gud, arn’t it?

Anyways, hope the new colors aren’t too hard on anyone’s eyes. I’m just never satisfied with things.