I’m not sure anyone really cares, but soon I’ll be taking down both TheScallion and my message board here. Neither get any use, so there’s no reason to have any upkeep with them, much less pay for them. Good riddance!

Update: The message board is gone and TheScallion has one month before I’m not paying for it anymore. Just a heads up.

I’m right on the cusp of switching hosting sites because GoDaddy does not “Go” for me at all. It takes forever for anything to come up, and I just don’t know if it’s my connection here (at school…*sigh*) or if it’s a problem that everyone who runs into this site is experiencing. I have a request from anyone who is reading this (on Facebook, mostly): please just go here and leave a comment (no need to sign up to do so) on how long it takes for the page to fully load. I’ve talked with a couple of folks and their times for loading the page has ranged from “forever!” to “1-2 seconds.” That’s an incredible inconsistency.

If I get a lot of comments saying it’s crap slow, then I’m done with GoDaddy’s hosting. If any of you know of good hosting sites, let me know. Thanks!

This is just a quick site update, but I’ve totally overlooked a feature in the little Lightbox plugin that I use for my photos on this site. The feature that I’m talking about is the ability to go from picture to picture within the Lightbox window itself, so you don’t have to close the window and go back and click on the next picture, etc., etc. All you have to to is point your mouse to either the right or left side of the photo and you’ll see an arrow pop up. Just click and it’ll go from picture to picture. Alternately, you can just use your right and left arrow keys while the photo is up, as well. Lightbox rocks!

Upon checking my site randomly today, I found that it’s back to its old, fast loading self. Something must have happened with Godaddy and they upgraded their junk to allow this pitifully small site to operate at normal speeds. Good job guys! Has anyone else noticed an increase on speed for loading this site?

Also: I’m inbetween computers at the moment. My laptop exploded (not literally) and I’m using my linux box solely for the time being. It’s not bad, of course, but I’m in the process of getting a new laptop, and then I’ll get back into the swing of things. The fact that my website has been painfully slow for the past couple of weeks stilted my writing, but it should improve now that I don’t have to wait longer than it took John McCain to get released from a POW camp to view my site.

Through its few iterations, garretspage.com has changed visually four times. If you want to count my old Angelfire site as an extension of that, then the count goes up to somewhere near seven. All of these different visual styles didn’t have any influence on the content of the site, however, which stayed primarily as a melting pot of everything that happened to excite or annoy me on any given day. As I grow older, this method of simply listing out grievances and complaints makes my mind weary. It’s harder and harder to find things to gripe about when you’ve matured past the point where you believe that everything is out to get you. In this way, the site is probably going to change a little bit.

Sophmoric humor and petty observations will always have a home here. In fact, even though I write this saying that I’m now above such things, I guarantee that there will still be these type of posts. I really don’t have a problem with this necessarily, as they are fun to do on occasion, but now instead of being the main course, they’ll more likely be researved for a side dish and you have to use a special fork to ingest.

I’ve pretty much made up my mind that the Flash stuff will also never return. I don’t really have a creative bone in my body in terms of visual output (in all mediums except for Nintendo DS Pictochat), so making Flash cartoons is definitely out of the question. Those three cartoons that I had up since the summer of 2001 will not be making a return. I can dredge them up from the depths if need be for special occasions, but I don’t see how they really fit with anything on this site anymore. Now, if I had something cool like Toonboom or something, then Flash animation might find its way back, but since I don’t have the money to spend on such things (or really any need to spend money on such things), this won’t happen.

Wallpapers fall into a sort of grey area. While I had fun making them, I don’t think they served as anything important besides my own self gratification. If I start making some more then I might upload them again, but I don’t know.

My last dilemma stems slightly from the first, where I don’t know exactly what to do with those sarcastic posts that I said were now peprika rather than peking duck. TheScallion has changed into a user submitted site, where posts like that can thrive and flourish, so I don’t know if I should continue posting such material here or focus those efforts over there. On the one hand I want that site’s content to grow on its own, without the creator’s help, but on the other hand I don’t think that writing on that site would be such a bad idea so long as I am not the primary contributor.

My page has grown over the years. Not so much in readership, but in the way that I’ve wanted it to look and feel. This is another one of those changes, and it’ll probably one of the biggest. There will still be random posts and thoughts, but I think overall I want it to have a more intelligent feel. According to the government, I am an adult, after all.

So I took the plunge and installed a new message board for the site. It needs some hardcore styling, but for right now it has the default template. Thanks go to phpBB.com for making the install process super easy.

Hopefully this new board won’t be as janky as the old one. While it worked, it wasn’t really my favorite thing in the world. There’s not a ton of things that this board does over the one that’s already in place, but the one thing that it doesn’t do is serve up a crapload of banner ads. That aspect of the deal I like.

For now I’m going to leave the link to the old message board and let people migrate. I did this last time when the forum changed but then people just said, “Change the friggin’ link!” I’m going to see how long it takes people to tell me to just change it over!

EDIT: So I went ahead and changed the link. The old message board can be found here.

So I’ve taken the lead from Effika, and checked out this WordPress jazz. So far I think it’s neato. I had a little trouble getting used to it at first, as I was trying to figure out how to do everything with it, but now that I’ve got pretty much everything set up, I think it’s keen. The biggest thing that made my last rendition of my page suck a big one was that there were no user comments, but now WordPress takes care of all of that. As much as I like taking pride in knowing everything about how my website is put together and whatnot, the ease of use of this makes me say: “who freaking cares?”

Also: RSS!  Weee!