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...

So I've completed everything I had set out to do for this website in the blog section, it only took a few weeks. Writing a website in PHP was SO much easier than writing it from the socket layer up in C++, and maybe even more fun (ha maybe).

Now I have a pretty good understanding of MySQL databases and PHP, and my CSS design skills have also gotten better too (I personally get crunk on the Dallas skyline in the new layout). I can also stop working on it as frequently, becase now my site is fully functional, including the new archive view (on the sidebar and the blog archive page) and the integrated Google site search.

And with a full-featured WYSIWYG editor for me (thanks to TinyMCE) and a nice drafts/publishing system, updates will be so much easier than they used to. Hopefully I will keep updating this thing!!

I still want to add more content, such as a flash-driven music section and stuff like projects/school/work/resume stuff, but for now, I feel accomplished.

For a more detailed list of crap I've done (and crap I want to do later), check out the Feature List page, it's always up to date.

This semester, four of my five classes are based on programming. A compilers class (hard), a computer architecture class (very difficult), a Python class (moderately time consuming), and a VHDL design class (time consuming... and hard). This translates into me having about 1.8 projects due a week that involve a heavy amount of coding... as well as hours upon hours staring at nothing but a computer screen.

This might seem pretty awful, and sometimes (usually) it is, but personally, I tend to completely zone out and focus only on the task at hand. Its easier for me to do things in large chunks of time and remain focused than it is to break it up over small periods. There happens to be a very serious downside though:

I turn into a computer zombie.

With hours straight of doing nothing but code/compile/debug/repeat, my brain seems to shutdown all other rudimentary functions. Basic conversation skills seem to escape me, and social interactions begin to approach the awkward stage.

It's almost like the feeling of riding a roller coaster and getting off... after you get off, you still feels like your ass is flying around the track. Computer Zombie Mode is very similar... it takes a few moments to re-calibrate my reality. Example:

"I sure worked up an appetite writing all that code! Time to make a sandwich. Shit no bread! I better throw an exception! Time to write an error handler..."

Of course if I had be writing for one my C classes, I would make the sandwich anyway with invalid pointers to my bread slices on accident. My first bite would result in a mouthful of segfaults followed by me vomiting all over the place.

Luckily it doesn't usually take long to get back to the real world. So barring a few semi-awkward initial conversations and distorted thought patterns, it's a relatively painless process.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go write VHDL for my design lab.

Seems like Facebook might be able to automatically import my blog via an RSS feed. Let's see if it works...

This is mainly for myself, so I can set some real goals for getting this site working, and watch my progress as I get more things finished. Here is a list of what I've done, and what I have left to do

Features Completed

Everything I've done so far:

• Blog
  • PHP front end
  • Admin back end for posts and comments
  • Comments
  • Automated email notifications when somebody leaves a comment
  • Sidebar listing
• Contact information
• "Green Leaf" CSS design and layout

Features To Implement

What I still want to do:

• Blog
  • Multiple pages (only shows first 5 currently)
  • Archive browsing/listing
  • More WYSIWYG post editor (instead of plain HTML)
  • Tag system (search, browse, etc
• Music section
  • PHP front end
  • Admin back end
  • Flash player for MP3s
  • Sidebar listing
• RSS feed generation
• Cleaner CSS and better semantic HTML layout
• Remember site visitor's info for comments
• User login for viewing private/friends posts
• Add more content
  • About section
  • Biography section
  • School section, with project/source code info and schedule

What Now??

It looks like I have a lot left... because I do. I'm sure it will take a while because of 1) school and 2) more fun things than writing web apps, but since I'm writing the back end as I go, at least content will keep coming in as the site starts to support it.

We'll see how this goes!!