I don’t know why I even bother using the sidebar on this website. I really should go the route of Vanlandw and just disperse of the sidebar all together.

But, I can’t find it in my heart to do that – so instead I mess around with it and change it pretty much every other week.

In the past, I’ve added the random gallery image, added the Netflix queue, added and removed all kinds of links, added and removed google ads, and played around with ul / li formatting.

THIS week, I’ve decided to add dynamic content to pull in my recent tracks from Last.fm and also my recent ‘tweets’ from Twitter.  I also got rid of some links, added in some new links, and generally wasted a couple hours pointlessly tweaking the sidebar.

I still can’t bring myself to use the built in widgets that K2 and WordPress have to offer; which undoubtedly makes everything in the sidebar harder to do.

Regardless, may I present to you sidebar version four hundred thirty ONE.

After a brief ‘meet n greet’ (beer and food) with EMC and VMware folks at Malarkey’s; I went to bed uncharacteristically early and am now enduring a mild case of insomnia.  I’ve been awake since 3 a.m. and have been mindlessly surfing channels, chatting with vanbergs about when we’ll be seeing “The Dark Knight”, laughing at the top 10 worst exam answers, and generally surfing the internet.

I found that WordPress and Gallery each had new versions out; so I decided to take the plunge.  I upgraded to WordPress 2.6 and Gallery 2.2.5.

I used only the-bob.org’s command line, and the process as a whole took 10 minutes and resulted in no issues whatsoever.

As per usual about once every 6 to 8 months, I compulsively decided to change my website’s theme.

Even though I feel drastic needs to make these changes, I hate doing it.  It’s so hard to find a decent theme to start with, and I definitely don’t have the time or the motivation to write my own theme from scratch.

Hoping for a solution to this ongoing problem, I have decided to use the theme “K2” – a popular theme that is currently embraced by Vanlandw and CSH.  This is a very simple, yet very aesthetically pleasant and easy on the eyes.

With that said – I am never using any other theme on palmerforpresident.com.  Any design, look, or usage of theming will all be based on K2.  I may slightly modify the theme, but it will always be K2 as a base.  Out of the box, the main thing i didn’t like was how dynamic K2 is.  It dynamically generates the sidebar and header nav on every single page that is loaded.  I modified both of these to be quite a bit more static – for me that’s a little nicer.

I don’t mind the theme, so any modifications will be fairly minor, but there will be a bit of a ‘transitional’ phase for me to get everything formatted to this themes css styles.

w00t k2

***Edit***
I submitted this to Digg… Feel free to Digg it if you like the idea!
***Edit***

The Page: www.YourSiteForaDay.com

The Idea: The idea is fairly simple. I have a website where I lease out the front page space on a “per day” basis. Therefore, anyone who wants to advertise can purchase a day on my website and have their content displayed on the main entrance page for their day. In the meantime, their page and link information is stored in an index of all the purchasers. One thing I’m still not sure on is the price of a “day”. Tentatively it is 100 dollars flat fee.

It sounds a little weird to talk or write about – so I wasn’t even really sure if this was a ‘good’ idea or not. I ran it by a couple people to gauge a reaction, and generally got some pretty good feedback. I started to think about logistics ans plan for how this could even possibly work. I found it better to just start developing, and everything just kind of materialized from there.

Today marked my official launch of a real internet project: www.YourSiteForaDay.com. I have to admt, after seeing the site and getting it launched, I do feel pretty enthusiastic about it.

Before launching this, I googled around for hours and did all kinds of research – because I figured if this is a good idea then somebody must have tried it at some point in the past. I did find a couple “similar” sites that lay out a big calendar and show things like “Bobs birthday” – but that’s not really what I’m doing here.

To my knowledge, something like this has never been attempted before – And I feel like it might be a good enough idea to really make for an interesting project. I’m crossing my fingers here and we’ll see what happens.

Just for good measure: www.YourSiteForaDay.com

About twice a year, I get an obsessive compulsive bug to completely overhaul my internet destination.
Sunday proved to be the 2nd time for 2007.

UL:

• Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1
• Upgraded to Gallery 2.2.3
• Installed and moderately tweaked new theme called “Sleepy Blue”

I guess i’m not really sure why I do this.  How much does it really matter what my website looks like.  At any rate, the change is made.  I still have a little tweaking to do to get work my content into this theme the way I want, but so far it’s coming along nicely.

I hate HTML, I hate CSS, I hate PHP, and I definitely hate MySQL.

Ef you, website.
I don’t really like you right now.