I Didn't Get Raptured, But...

As you might've noticed, posting has decreased pretty dramatically around these parts. While I haven't completely abandoned this blog, and don't plan to abandon it, I obviously haven't been using it very much. For awhile now, I've tended tend to post little blurbs on my Twitter reasonably often.

But I've also been posting regularly over on my Tumblr, which most of you probably aren't aware of. As of this writing, I've made seventeen posts over there this month compared to zero over here.

http://mikesboxofawesome.tumblr.com

I've had that Tumblr for a few years, but tended to favor posting here more than there. Now it's pretty much the opposite, where I update that fairly regularly and this place kind of gets under-utilized. Blogger/Blogspot seems more suited for longer posts, whereas lately I tend to post short blurbs, pics, videos, etc.

The point being, you might want to add my Tumblr to your bookmarks or RSS readers. I wouldn't delete this site (unless you're sick of me) though, since I do still plan to use it, just not that frequently. (I might do something like link over there whenever I make a post over here.)

Those Spam Filters Are Working Now

So far, so good. Here's our first piece of garbage that got filtered...

I'll still see this sort of crap in my automatic comment notification emails though. Well, unless I turn them off.

Coming Soon - Spam Filters!

Blogger is introducing comment spam filtering. I can't wait. So long Asian comment spammers. (I hope you guys get bowel cancer.)

Dear Asian Comment Spammers

Please fuck off and die in a grease fire. Thank you.

Seriously, Blogger/Blogspot needs to come up with some sort of comment spam filters. I waste more time deleting Asian spammer comments. Sadly, those seem to be the only comments left these days. If it keeps up I'll just disable commenting.

Semi-Important Site Update

The bigdarkcloud.com domain name is up for renewal before the end of this month. After having had that domain name for over a decade, I'm not renewing it this time. The last few renewals were out of habit or tradition, but the name doesn't really fit me (although I still have plenty of healthy cynicsm) anymore and hasn't for a long time now.

For awhile I kept the old domain name so that people who I've lost touch with* that would sporadically visit the site could still find it. Most people know how to find me by now, through things like Facebook. So it's not like keeping the name is worth the $10 or whatever it is to renew the domain name for another year.

* Friends from former workplaces, old friends who've moved away, or even local friends that I don't see much these days.

This post is pretty dry, so enjoy this mildly amusing
and slightly suggestive picture of two bugs

At the moment the old domain redirects to my Blogspot page, but the redirect will die off when the domain expires. So, those of you who still have bigdarkcloud.com bookmarked, you might want to update it to robotmustdestroy.blogspot.com.

I think the last thing online where I still use bigdarkcloud as a screen name is my Twitter account, but I'm pretty sure it's easy to keep your existing account and just change your name on there, so I'll probably do that soon. I just need to think up something. If I can't come up with anything good or I get lazy and uncreative I can just use my real name.

A Bit Of Maintance

For whatever reason, this morning, the urge hit me to clean up the post labels. I condensed a few categories, like "dvd" and "blu-ray" are now "dvd and blu-ray" and "movies" and "tv" are now "movies and tv". I also dropped a bunch of one time usage tags, like "battlestar galactica", which oddly enough I only used in one post, yet ignored every other time I wrote about the show. I also got rid of a few redundant tags like "odd" since all of those posts fit fine under "weird".

The only reason I'm mentioning this is, depending on your RSS reader, some of you might see a ton of old posts showing up as new because they were slightly updated by changing the labels.

Some Minor Site Changes

Normally I seem to change the look of the site around the beginning of the year. (I guess I get sick of looking at the same page after awhile.) This year, I got the bug a little earlier than usual.

I took one of the default Blogger themes and made some minor tweaks. (A few lines of code here and there.) One cool thing about using one of the default templates is getting newer Blogger features to work that didn't work with the custom template that I was using this past year.

So now there's things like embedded comments (with avatars!) and having a "read more" feature for really long posts that would take up a bunch of space on the front page.

Also, slightly improved is the shared Google Reader stories box. They improved the widget since I first started using it. Most of the things in my link posts show up on my shared stories page before they ever get put on here.

I decided to drop the Amazon box on the sidebar with the list of whatever DVDs, Blu-rays, and video games were coming out in the current month. Honestly, it didn't seem worth keeping since I haven't made very much from running the ads this year. Between the crappy economy, and the fact that I know the majority of you download stuff instead of buy it, and it just seems pointless to keep running them. It's pretty much like when I dropped Google's Adsense a few months back. Nobody EVER clicked on those. At least a few of you bought some stuff on Amazon through me (and thank you for that!).

I did keep the Amazon links in the "What I'm watching and playing" section, since it still makes sense to have it there. I also put the search box below that, just in case any of you does still want to pick something up through Amazon and throw me a tiny cut.

One thing I screwed up was not backing up or copying down the Links section of the sidebar. So I'm going to have to redo that. I wanted to overhaul that section anyway. I threw in a few temporary links for now.

Closing Out The Year With Some Minor Changes To The Site

Every year I got the itch to change things up a little on my site as the year draws to a close. This year is no expection. However, this time I didn't want to go for a major overhaul. Just a tiny bit of streamlining. So I took a break from watching TV and my second play through of GEARS OF WAR 2 (which I beat for the first time the other day) to rework a few things on here.

- I decided to switch to a fixed width layout. So I re-tweaked the code of the theme back to it's original fixed width format, but changed the dimensions to suit my needs.

- I wanted to de-clutter the sidebar a bit. To me, it looked like there was just too much stuff on there. So I added a three column section on the bottom for things that I felt could be dropped from the sidebar, but didn't want to drop completely.

- Dropped the Amazon UK widget. I'll still occasionally recommend things from there, but it was sensible to drop it. The majority of my readers are from the US, according to my stats at least. Plus, I have yet to make a single Amazon UK sale. Not that I'm too worried about that, since unlike the US Amazon, my payments from UK would be in the form of gift certificates. So away that went.

- I reduced the number of posts displayed on the main page. That should help speed things up slightly.

I'm not done yet though. I've still got changes to implement, like possibly changing the color of the bottom section and re-doing the remaining Amazon widget (both in terms of content and position). I might also try to find the time to redo the logo.

I Made Some Changes And Now You're Stuck Reading About Them

You might notice a few changes. Or you might not. I really don't know how observant you are.

• New version of the logo added at the beginning of the week. (Still a bit of a work in progress.)


• Dropped the delicious embed from the sidebar. I honestly don't add links to that often enough to warrant keeping it on the sidebar. Besides, it's still linked in my profile section for the few people who still want to access that info. Most things that I link to online are either in my daily link posts or in my Google Reader Shared Items. So as long as you read both of those, you're not missing a thing by my killing off the delicious thing.


• I moved a few things around on the sidebar. Hopefully that will speed up load times a little bit. Non-essentials like "recent comments" and my "latest google reader headlines" got dropped to the bottom of the sidebar. I was considering dropping both of those things, especially the reader bit, since that has it's own page with the full articles and pix. I'm leaving them for now though. Does anybody even look at those two things? Any feedback on that is welcome.


• I shrunk the two Amazon recommendations boxes to display 4 items each, made them narrow and put them side by side. They're also lower on the page because they seem to load the slowest out of everything on the page. (I also need to update those, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.) I've also got some other Amazon stuff in the works, because I'm a shameless whore.


• Changed the post labels to a dropdown menu, which takes up a lot less screen real estate. I considered dropping them completely from the sidebar, but then I realized that a lot of times when I browse other sites for the first time I like to check out their post categories. At some point in the near future I might add a post label cloud at the bottom of the page, since there's not very much going on down there. (Does anybody ever even usually make it that far?)


• Added Google Ads a few days ago. So please whitelist this site if you use AdBlock! Anyway, like Amazon, Google is a company I use all the time, and I don't find their ads annoying. At least as far as internet ads go anyway. It's supposed to be all keyword based, so barring any technical snafus, it should be displaying interesting links related to the stuff I mention on here anyway. Also, running ads brings me that much closer to realizing my dream of making money while wearing my pajamas nearly 24-7.

I've still got a bunch of other things that I want to do. It's just a matter of finding the time, because I tend to get obsessive and do this stuff in 12 hour blocks when I do sit down to do it. Plus I have to do everything on a test site first, because it's pretty easy to break a Blogger page if you're not careful when making customizations.

Mid-July Sidebar Tweaks

As you might've noticed, I've made some minor tweaks to the sidebar. It's all still a work in progress.

I added a new RSS feed and the option to subscribe to updates via email. The old feeds will still work as well, so you don't have to switch if you're already subscribed. Unless you want to.

I also condensed the links to my other online things into icons instead of text, which actually takes up less screen real estate than plain text did.

Robot Must Have Logo

After a few weeks of just plain text on a blue background, I finally got around to making a logo.

Actually, I stayed up all night on Tuesday going into Wednesday and I made a few different logos. Finally I decided to go with the one that I've got up there right now. I'm still not sure about the background color, but that's an easy change.

Doing a Google Image search for "robot" did yield some interesting results...

Am I the only one creeped out by that image? The robot seems like some sort of gleeful mechanical molester and that dark-haired kid seems to know what's up.

Anyway, also in the pipeline is a links page. I already linked to it in the toolbar along the lower left side of the logo. I just haven't compiled a list and posted it yet. I haven't had an actual links page in years, but I used to have a gigantic one on the older version of BDC.

Some Small Changes

I've been doing some minor tinkering with this page.

First, I moved the Twitter widget to the bottom of the sidebar. It was causing everything else to load slowly (or not at all). Maybe once Twitter seems to work out whatever server issues they're having this week I'll move that back up.

In the Twitter widget's place I moved the links to my other stuff. Once I can find or make some good icons for those services I'll switch over to icons instead of plain text for those links. I just think that sort of thing looks nicer.

I also moved the Amazon search boxes up and put them side by side.

Capitalist swine that I am, I also added some new stuff to both of my Amazon recommendations lists.

I added a few links to the sidebar. I've got a bunch in a text file that I want to add, but until the categories list gets longer, everything would look lopsided if I did that. I might just create a links page, so I can link to all of the stuff that just doesn't fit on the sidebar, but that I think is worth visiting. (It'll probably be a blog entry with a permanant menu link to it. I'm not sure if updating it will make it reload in RSS readers though. I don't want it to do that.)

I experimented with 3 columns along the footer, but I wasn't happy with those results. Ditched that.

Bigdarkcloud.com Now Redirects Here

Hopefully now that I pointed the domain to redirect to this page, the remaing five people left who wondered where I went will know now. (It'd probably be best to just bookmark this page rather than keep using the old bdc bookmark though.)

I'm still working out the new domain host thing. (It looks like it's still pending.)

A Fairly Busy Saturday

In a (futile) attempt to beat the rush, it was decided that we'd take my dad out for his Father's Day dinner on Saturday night. Well, we were hardly the only people who thought up such a cunning plan. (My vote was for Monday evening, everybody goes on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday for those holidays.) Anyway, it was a nice meal, even if I didn't get home until about 10 at night.

Getting home so late ruined my other plans for the my Saturday night. One of my friends called up because he wanted to go see THE HAPPENING. So, really dinner running so late didn't ruin anything, it saved me from sinking my money into that garbage. (The movie, not my friend.) Based on every film the directors has made since THE SIXTH SENSE* being utter shit, and the bad reviews, I was pre-disposed to figuring the movie was crap. I figured I'd go just for the excuse to hang with my friend and figured the movie would give me something to mock on here.

* Even THE SIXTH SENSE isn't that great. I find it to be one of those movies that you watch once and think it's pretty good, but it doesn't hold up well on repeat viewings. I have to give the guy credit, he's managed to coast on the success of that one movie for nearly a decade now.

At dinner, my brother informed me that he's beaten METAL GEAR SOLID 4. That certainly explains why his eyes were so bloodshot. Hopefully, now that he's beat it, that means that he'll let me borrow his PS3 and the game.

I also spent a good portion of the later part of the night working on web stuff. I changed the font on the sidebar to Calibri, not sure how I feel about it. (I don't know how many people have it installed, so it might not look right.) Most of the other mods were done on a test Blogspot blog page that I set up. The stuff that works will be ported over to this page once I get it all ironed out. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to lay things out. Things like more links, and figuring out the best way to format the Amazon widgets on the sidebar. (I've also been tinkering with a bottom bar, to try and lighten up some of the clutter on the sidebar. Of course it works fine in Firefox, but behaves strangely in IE depending on how the browser is sized. Sigh.) I also still need to come up with a logo.

I still haven't seen this week's DOCTOR WHO, or some of the other things I had planned to watch over the weekend.

Updates On The Old Domain And Future Possibilities

Alright. I still haven't made any of the changes I have planned for this blog yet. Hopefully in the next few days I'll get to that.

I signed up for a new host for the bigdarkcloud.com domain tonight. I went with i6Networks, who offer free hosting. (I guess they put a small ad on the bottom of your pages or whatever. I can live with that. I'm just waiting for my account to get approved, and then I'll have to point the domain over to the new servers. So, hopefully in a few days, bdc will be back online.

What does that mean for this page?

Well, first of all, I plan to keep this blog going and keep it as my new primary blog. (Probably with a domain name pointing to it.) I'll link to it from BDC, which will become an archive of the old blog. I've also got some other things that I want to do with BDC, just not right away. I've been saying for awhile now that I wanted to go with a new name for my site. At the same time, I want to retain the name that I've been using for over a decade online for things. So, it'll be the best of both worlds.

I've also been knocking around the idea of a few (maybe two) more blogs. BDC could serve as sort of a central hub for those. Then again, given how prone I am to losing steam on some web projects, that could be stretching myself a bit thin. It's all a bit up in the air right now.

I just want to get something going with the old domain name so that people can find me. (Aside from the ones who found this page via my Twitter, Myspace, or Feedburner notices about the change.)

More Site Updates

A few more people should be picking up on the move now that I've pointed my old Feedburner feed to this page. I've also posted notes on Twitter and on my Myspace. I never had a mailing list, so most people still don't know about the current situation with the move and all of that.

I haven't really done any of the planned customizations that I had in mind. At least not yet. Realistically, I'll put it off until the weekend. A lot of it is graphics work like a logo, and replacing some of the default images that came with this theme. (I already modded a few code things in the theme like switching it from fixed width to stretch and some other stuff.)

I also joined up with Amazon UK's affiliates program. 40-50% of the stuff I watch is from the UK, and since I like to write about that stuff along with the US TV shows and movies that I watch, it only made sense to sign up for that program as well as the one run by the US Amazon. Especially since a lot of those region 2 DVDs aren't available in the US (sometimes even of US shows). All region DVD players are common and importing via Amazon is easy for people in the US. Plus my stats show that I get quite a few readers from across the pond, so I figured having both Amazons as sponsors would work well.

I'm still trying to work out the best method for the sponsored recommendation widgets on the sidebar. I might make them both only one column width each and put them side by side.

If I can grab all of the files from the old site, I should be able to create an archive. I've got a possible hosting solution (and other offers as well) lined up. I'd hate to let the old site die off completely, it's been around for so long. Plus, it's one of the older blogs on the internet. (Roughly a little more than a decade old.)

So, basically there's still tons to do.

Some Random Ramblings On A Tuesday Evening

I've switched blog names again. This one wasn't swiped from any UK comedy telly, so I doubt anybody will scoop the domain out from under me, if I decide to buy it. (Even if they do, I've got another name close to this that I can use.)

There's still a lot of changes and customizations to make to the page, but I didn't want to spend my entire Monday and Tuesday evenings attached to the computer. Instead I watched last night's VENTURE BROS and then watched a few episodes of COUPLING on DVD.

I'm simply not designed for this heat. Even sitting inside a nice, air-conditioned house, I can't wait for the cooler temperatures of fall.

Does anybody else download podcasts that they never listen to? I've been regularly downloading Kevin Smith's SModcasts since they started, but I never seem to find the time to actually listen to them. I think the last one I listened to was #12. Right now they're up to #53. So why do I keep downloading them?

Maybe now that there's nothing on on TV in primetime, I can catch up on those podcasts. Of course, I'm more likely to try catching up on all of the movies and TV shows that I've had piling up instead.

Settling In And Starting Over

Starting over is a bit of a pain in the ass. That's not just in terms of having virtually zero content, or figuring out how to migrate regular readers.

Somebody else already took the bigdarkcloud Blogspot name. Oddly enough, they haven't done anything with it.

Then, sometime between my taking the cursethesemetalhands Blogspot name a week or two ago and today, somebody has registered this name as a dot com. Which kinda kills any plans I had of buying that as a domain name and pointing it here. So, I'll probably have to change the name again. Which sucks, because I've already gotten one Google search result hit. (To be fair, I've had another, somewhat similar, name in mind for awhile that nobody has taken. Yet.)

Then again, if I point the bigdarkcloud.com domain name at this blog, I think it supersedes any name already in place. Plus, I already own that domain name for about another year before I have to renew it. On the other hand, I've been saying for awhile that I wanted a newer site name anyway, so I might just register a new name.

Name woes aside, I've still got a bunch of customizations to do. (I even made myself a list.)

All I know is, I'm pretty sure the old site is dead. I'm fairly certain it's not a PHP or MySQL problem, because when I tried to put up a plan HTML page explaining that the site was broken and providing some links on where else to find me online that page wouldn't even load. On the other hand, I can still FTP in and get mail from the old site, so I'm not certain it's 100% dead yet. I still plan on transferring all of the old files to back them up.

New Location, First Post

Looks like the domain is down (and might be staying that way). So in the meantime, I've set up a new (possibly temporary) home. Honestly, if things kept up the way they were this was probably going to happen by late summer or early fall anyway. I'm currently in a financial crunch, and it wasn't very likely that I was going to be able to spare the cash to spring for domain hosting for another year.

I freely admit I swiped the name of this blog from a recent episode of PEEP SHOW. (Edit: For about a day the name of the blog was "curse these metal hands". I dropped it because somebody else already bought the dot com domain for that name.)

I'm still tinkering with things, and most people probably don't know that I've relocated to here. At some point, even though it's got a different name, I may point the old domain name here. If I continue on here, I'll also be pointing things like the Feedburner feeds here as well.