Aberro Specus

So apparently the hosting service I use has been going downhill, a lot, the past year or so. I popped on to check how many posts behind I was (am) in the Blogenning to find my site down this morning. “This isn’t good,” I thought. I tried to access the admin site for my hosting service, nothing. I tried to access their main website, nothing. I tried to call them when I found their customer service number online… nothing. “Hmmmm…” I though, as I chatted with Brandon about it, “This isn’t good at all…”

Then suddenly my site comes back up (obviously). No explanation, no apology, no response from my hosting company. And apparently this has been going on for a while, for a variety of reasons and people.

So I’m thinking about switching my hosting service.

The obvious option is godaddy. They’re pretty much the most well known service around (that I can think of anyway) and their prices are good… only slightly more than I’m paying now I believe. What service do you all use? I’m looking for options here, because I have a few months left on my current subscription to this company, and I figure I’ll ride it out while I think about switching. I’m  looking for  pricing and options mostly, how many MySQL databases, bandwidth, etc. Please, leave comments :).

So that’s why my site has been down, if you were wondering, and that’s what’s been going on.

More postenings soon!

~Ian

In case you haven’t noticed I’ve made a few more changes to the site. The biggest one being the new banner at the top of the screen (avert your eyes a degree or two up and you’ll probably be able to see it…). I also changed up a few minor details on the site, including the “best viewed at” part of the about section to the right (I added Chrome to the acceptable browsers and updated the best resolution to 1280×1024). On to the “interesting note.”

I’ve had wordpress statistics installed on my blog pretty much since I started it. It keeps track of how many visits I get a day, what posts people are reading, how they are finding my site, etc. This lets me track unique page visits as well, how many IPs hit my site each day. When I’m posting regularly this number usually averages around 45-50, some days it’s around 30, some it’s around 70. The last few days it has skyrocketed, and it didn’t take my long to figure out why. Megan Fox Porn.

Yes. The day after I posted my “short” rant on  how Megan Fox has the acting abilities of a porn star (okay, a bad one, I have to admit some porn stars aren’t horrendous actresses apparently), my “unique visits” counter shot up to 188, more than triple the daily average. Because people searching for “megan fox porn”/”megan fox porno”/”fox demon porn” (I wonder about that one…) have been visiting my site in droves. Now, while this drives up my page visits, and I’ve noticed that many of these people are probably reading other articles on my site as well (based on the what posts are being read stats), I’m conflicted about this. Do I really want the tools that A: think Megan Fox is hot, and B: want to see her having sex, looking at my site? Yes and no. On one hand, I’ve seen the Paris Hilton sex tape purely out of morbid curiosity, so I understand the amusement/boredom factor in looking up “famous person porn.” On the other hand, Megan Fox doesn’t have a (known) sex tape, so it’s purely people going “I want to see Magan Fox nekkid hurr hurr” (Yes “magan” was one of the spellings that got people to my site…) and searching in their sad desperation online for anything hinting at nakedness involving this girl. (A note to those of you reading this article because you were searching online for Megan Fox porn – I offer no apologies for this post, if you’re reasons for looking up “Megan Fox porn” are not sad desperation, good for you, you don’t need to yell at me, just feel confident in your superiority and know that I don’t give a shit.)

So am I happy about the massively increased viewing of my website? Yes. Am I happy about the reason? Not really, but I’ll take what I can get…

~Ian

I’ve made a few more changes to the site since yesterday. First and foremost, I redid the sidebar, rearranging slightly and moving the Twitter feed to it. There will no longer be any daily digests, you can access my twitter from there.

Secondly, and more important, I’ve made a few changes to a few of the pages of the site… mainly my Music page and the About Ian page.

The Music page - I updated my projects, as well as adding a link to the [citation needed] project I did with Brandon and Dave a couple years back. I also added a list of the various songs/solos I’ve performed over the years, as well as the songs that I currently play/sing (well). I also put a list of my musical influences (which may or may not be updated with links…)

The About Ian page - I updated my bio here, as well as uploaded my Resume. You might see a few more updates to this page in the near future.

The biggest update going on was the update to the music page. I went through and listed all the songs I’ve sung over the years, which was a feat in itself, because I had to do some research just to get the names of a few (curse my memory!). Keep your eyes peeled for more updates coming soon, I’m going to be modifying content here and there as we go along (as always).

~Ian

Hello all. I’ve decided to make a few more, minor, edits to the website, the first being I added a Tag Cloud over in the sidebar. I figured this would make it easier to find posts relevant to your interests… as the saying goes.  However, the next change I’m thinking of making requires a vote. So those of you who read the site with some diligence, please vote in the following poll. Thank you!

~Ian

In the beginning, there were three, but now there will be seven! Those of you who remember the “Great Blogging Pact” a few months back will have noticed that… well… we failed. Laziness and negligence won the day, and in the end we retreated, bruised, broken, but will some will flickering in our cold, dark hearts. That fire has been reignited, the will has regrown, and this time we are dragging more cannon fodder friends along with us! Reigniting the passion is just step one, step two is fortifying the defenses, holding back laziness and negligence so as we can triumph. Today is the day to seize our destiny or perish trying! Fight and you may die. Run, and you’ll live… at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin’ to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies, that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take… our freedom!* cough cough Sorry I got sidetracked there.

Okay, so returning to my point, we are going to re-establish our blog agreement, starting today. Just to cover the bases, and let any new readers know what this agreement is…

When anyone adds a new post to their blog, above and beyond whatever post debt they may have accrued, all others will endeavor to update their blog within 24 hours of the initial post. Auto-generated posts pulling from twitter do not count towards the agreement. Leniency will be provided in case something comes up of course, but try to do your best to be prompt. Failure to update without good reason may result in us calling you names or insulting your mother. You have been warned.

This of course means that I have to post within 24 hours of any of the other members posting (twitter-feeds and response posts do not count) and that if I post, they much all post as well. So who are these mysterious other pact members?

Belynda Cianci - Dimestore Romance, Dave Halperin - Independent Thought Alarm, Rachel Ober - Life & Times of a Female Software Engineer, Tom Quinn - Time With Tom, Brandon Schory - Extant Musings, and last but not least Jaco Vermeulen - Jaco’s Random Writings. These are the fools friends who have signed this pact in their blood, and as the first week progresses, sweat and tears. I recommend that you go visit all of their sites and see what they are all about, and continue to do so as time progresses if you enjoy what they have to say.

As far as I am concerned, I’ve already posted a few times about the direction this blog is heading in, and none of that will change. I’m going to try to post at least three times a week, if not more, and I am going to try and make at least one of those posts be fictional writing. Until then, try and relax, don’t get too excited or you might hurt yourself.

Prepare thy souls for an adventure, for we are about to partake on one!

~Ian

*This is a Braveheart reference. Sorry.

Originally the idea behind this site was to not only give myself a space to spew out opinionated drivel philosophical musings, as well as anything else I felt like posting, like short fiction and whatnot, as well as have a place to discuss these posts. However it has, obviously, dwindled. I’m going to try and change that.

The first step in changing that is to make this an easier place to discuss the posts. So, I am trying out a new plugin for WordPress called IntenseDebate. IntenseDebate is not new, but it’s new to me. It makes it easier to comment, track comments, and reply to comments, not just for me, but for visitors also. This way, this blog can become a better place for discussion, not just my worthless babbling dumping ground intellectual reservoir. SO! Comment away! One thing that “ID” should add is Comment Threading, making it easier to respond to a specific comment. It also supports OpenID, something I believe Brandon has talked about before. So try it out, and hopefully this site will become a thicker intellectual jungle.

~Ian

The word “back,” and specifically the phrase “I’m back” have always interested me. Was I ever really  gone? What does it mean to be “back?” Something to explore another day I suppose. The point is, I’m posting, looky :). This post is coming second, so that you can read it first, but I posted a short story I wrote earlier today. It’s blatantly inspired by Lovecraft, but that isn’t a bad thing, is it? Enjoy. I will be posting more frequently here on out, and I know I always say that, so take it as you will.

~Ian

As you can plainly see, there have been a few changes here.

I decided to go with a new theme (As of yet unedited by me, I’ll get around to that). I like this one more because it’s simpler and a little easier to read, etc. For now the site will stay with this theme, unless I hear any major criticism about it.

The other major change that’s happening is I’m re-doing my Categories/Tags system. Before I was ignoring tags and just putting everything into a Category. I’m going to reverse that, more or less. Put each post under ONE Category, and then fill in tags for the rest of it. This is how it SHOULD be done, and this is how I’m going to start doing it. Only reason I didn’t before is because… well… I was lazy, and my old theme handled tags oddly. So starting with this post you’ll see the new system, and I plan on going back through old posts EVENTUALLY and fixing all of them… we’ll see about that though.

There may be some more changes coming soon as well, keep an eye out for them :).

~Ian

((Note: This does not count towards the posting agreement with Jaco and Brandon, and they are not obligated to update themselves because of this post.))

I finally got around to backing up my site and upgrading Wordpress and a bunch of other things. The site should be working faster now too! Yay. If anything seems broken, please let me know immediately so I can fix it. There is also a chance I will be updating the theme as well, maybe changing it entirely. We’ll see about that though…

In other news, I am now keeping an e-notepad, located at http://notepad.aberrospecus.com. Feel free to read it whenever. It will include, most likely, snippets of things I’m working on, ideas I feel like jotting down, photos, quotes I find interesting, and other misc. things like that, that I don’t feel like putting in here. Check it out. I added a link to the navigation bar on the left as well!

~Ian

Oh my, I’m updating.

I realize it has been a while, and I apologize. My life has been a mixture of extreme boredom and extreme stress lately, and while that is no excuse for neglecting my site, I have. I’ve made a suicide update pact with Brandon (who is now keeping his own blog over here), so he and I will both be trying to update our respective blogs in sync, so to speak. With that in mind,he posted last night, or early this morning rather, so I thought I would share something I’ve been working on recently. It’s short, but a good preview of one of the two novel/possible comics I’m working on. This one is a “Through the Looking Glass meets Lovecraftian tale of horror” style I’ve decided to play around with. Now… if I could convince Ben Templesmith to put vision to my words when it’s done I’d be happy, but I doubt that will happen… so we’ll see what I do with it when it’s done. But for now enjoy! Preview is after the cut.

Continue reading