So, it's been a while since the last update... but I'm refusing to let this blog die the slow and quiet death my blogs of the past have seen. Today, however, I think I realized exactly what has caused all of my previous sites in general to vanish into the dark nothingness of the Internet... and why I haven't updated in a while.

Basically, the life of a college kid is in constant flux; every 4 months, you have a brand new set of classes, a completely new schedule, and new professors. Or it may even be summer and you're either back at home, working at an internship, doing summer school... or maybe just lounging around for 3 months being a bitch.

Point is... each discontinuity on the life v. time graph has very little sympathy for old developed habits and the like... so things that I had gotten into a good groove for (blogging in this case) tend to fall by the wayside. Since my day-to-day schedule is so different than it was during the school year, my internal cron service needs a revamping. But, now that I've settled in at work, it's time to reinstate all the mundane and miscellaneous minutia I love to saturate my life with.

It makes me wonder how long I will have this site, and this blog. This current incarnation of the site specifically is relatively new (PHP/MySQL), but I have blog entries I imported from an old live journal (circa 2005), as well as the previous brandonvalosek.com site.

Will I be writing about my kid's first words some day? Or maybe how the Drrty Boiz are still rocking out at age 80... giving arthritis the finger and playing at our local retirement home... who knows? But for now, expect updates to return to their regularly scheduled frequency.

So a friend of mine sent me a link to a video of a guy that calls himself The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) rapping about good site design practices and SEO optimization. This guy is pretty ridiculous... and he has some more videos on his YouTube profile as well if you want to check them out. Here's the video:

Pretty damned funny, I think. In other news, I start working for Dell tomorrow. I'm looking forward to having (at least temporarily, before Fall tuition is due) a positive  derivative to my $/time graph.

I'll be working in the enterprise product group on a new family of servers with the board team, as well as doing some work for the firmware guys. My manager also mentioned that they need somebody to port an aging MS Access database to a MySQL/PHP solution, and since I've learned quite a bit about that stuff from doing this site, it would make a great side project.

I'm also very much looking forward to getting into a routine again... the next few weeks are crucial for getting my fat ass into a workout and running schedule. I'm hoping I can run 4-5 times a week and work out least twice, but hopefully three times.

One last thing-- today I basically just wasted away my life with Derek in what was a quintessential summer day:  woke up lazily at about 1 PM, then proceeded to make sandwiches, then read some out in the sun followed by a swim spot, and then Randall's for some grosh. We made some questionably-shitty frozen pizzas dinner, and then in a bit we're going to be making some Rice Krispies treats.

Does it get any better than that?

So I, with my infinite capacity for continued procrastination, have recently added some new features to the site.

If you direct your attention over to the left, you'll notice some new items in the sidebar. Under the "Status" heading, you'll see that there are two sections: The first (very nerdily I might add) displays my current standings on the world-wide ladder for the real-time strategy game Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath. Wow.

More interestingly (maybe) is the next section, which displays my updates from the site Twitter. If you don't know what Twitter is, it's basically the same thing as the "Current Status" feature from Facebook... and that's it. Pretty lame if you ask me, but I guess the appeal is in the simplicity of posting short messages from your cell phone, etc. They also make it easy to post updates like that on blogs and websites.

However, there is practically nobody in my age group on Twitter, so it would be completely pointless except that I found a Facebook application that posts Facebook status updates to Twitter. So... in a very round-about fashion, my Facebook updates are now posted to my site.

The coolest new feature is found under the "Now Playing" heading. A small plugin for Winamp (Brandon Fuller's Now Playing app) pings my website with a basic POST HTTP request containing information about the current song every time I play something. On my end, some basic PHP scripting updates a database with the song info, current date, and play count. The songs under "Now Playing" currently just reflect the most recently played songs.

Eventually I will expand this feature, to display maybe the top songs played this week or something. I also will have a dedicated page that will show more info about what I'm listening to on Winamp.

Last but not least, I now am officially using the AMAZING Flickr API to interact with my photo site. The front page now uses this to display the first 60 or so recent photos instead of bastardizing multiple copies the frail Javascript Flickr provides to show random pictures.

Now that I'm using the real API, the photo page will eventually come back online in a MUCH crunker form that shows my favorite pictures and SHOULD integrate everything into my site.

Fun stuff... and more to come! A real update should follow in the next few days I'm sure, but with my last (3) projects of Junior year due this week and finals approaching... the outlook seems grim.

Of course, whenever there's a shit ton of stuff to do... procrastination becomes even more alluring...

I'm working on creating a more robust layout; one that will resize gracefully on small 4:3 browsers (like 1024 x 768) all the way up to larger wide screens.

I'm trying to use a more liquid design that expands to use screen real estate when available, but avoids a cramped feeling when running in smaller windows. CSS has some awesome ways for doing this, I just need to find them.

So in the process, the site will undergo quite a few incremental changes, feel free to give me feedback regarding any of it along the way, or drop me a line if you just have some ideas.

The photo section is also being redone as I try to make use of the Flickr API instead of abusing the "photo badge" Javascript that currently makes the photo mosaic on the home page.

So bear with me as the site will be in a continual state of flux for a while!

Monday marks five weeks since the first post on this new blog platform of mine. At that time, hardly anything was working and the layout was borrowed from a previous site. I've made some progress!!

It's also been almost a week since my last update, as getting back into the swing (and by swing I mean shitfest) of school was more difficult that originally anticipated... of course due to my joy of doing nothing. This is hardly a 'real' update, so hopefully I'll write something more interesting soon. But until then, here are some interesting stats about my site, collected by Google Analytics:

• The majority of visistors from referring sites (ie they got here via a link) come from Facebook, followed by digg, and then the least come from other friends' blogs.
• Only 10% of users get here via a search engine like Google. The others get here directly (typing in the address or via their favorite list), or by referral.
• Over 70% of visitors use Firefox, 17% use IE, and the rest use something else.
• Though almost 93% of all visitors are from the US, I've had hits from all over... almost all of Europe, Russia, China, Indonesia, Australia...
• My "visitor loyalty" sucks... 43% of visitors never return, the rest average 10-20 visits.
• My most popular entry to date is (sadly) the how-to post regrading playing cnc3 online.
• Some of the popular search engine queries people have used to find my site include "brandon valosek" and "ok sign below the waist game" (lol).

That's all... a real update should follow soon...