Posts from ‘Quit Your Day Job’
So what do you wanna know?
Once again I find myself going to the blog post well, only to find it dry without even a deadite to speak of.
I think I’m a little spoilt over at The Coalition of Awesomeness and the Midnight Movie Club as those blogs have themes in which to work around, but out here all I’ve got is me and my stupid brain which hasn’t been playing ball of late. Of course there are the flying monkeys in the QYDJ lab but those little bastards only want to talk about oily versus dry peanut butter. That conversation gets old quickly let me tell you!
This is the reason why there's no point responding to those email notifications...
Once I exhausted all avenues of discourse regarding peanut butter I turned to ol faithful idea machine Google. Unfortunately even though there were blog posts that boasted “101 blog post ideas to get you thinking” the majority (all that I could bring myself to look at) featured helpful ideas such as:
- Write something funny
- Give advice
- Give your opinion on something
- Write about something you know…
And then they got worse, I’m thinking of developing the universal law of writing good blog posts according to these sites: “write about something that people want to read”. Bravo. Great advice. Where’s my cheque?
So I thought I might open it up to you guys and see if there was anything in particular you were interested in reading about? I’ve done this before and people have left really good ideas and then I’ve completely lost track of them and I feel bad about that because they were really great ideas… yeah I know I should really go back and find those posts. Of course if you write your suggestion again maybe the power of repetition will get through to me.
On another note I’m catching up on some commission pieces that are over due, got a bunch of superhero illustrations coming 
So ask away and I’ll try to respond to at least 34% of them in post format.
Hi everyone, it would appear that my comments system Disqus has gotten a little trigger happy with some of your comments and I want to apologise to everyone who has had their comments disappear.
It was especially a problem when posting links to other items and some of you guys who have been commenting for years were automatically classed as spam and I feel more than awful about that as I missed a bunch of really positive and thoughtful comments.
To be honest I doubt I’ll be able to go back and find all of them that I haven’t read, I certainly doubt I’ll be able to now answer them all but I am disengaging the disqus comment system from the site. Fortunately it synchronises the comments and pretty much all the one’s that went missing are in my WordPress database still.
A couple of problems though:
- the threading does not show up and so all comments that already appear no longer fall indented under the intended comment – I have no idea how to fix this – it makes me really pissed off just thinking about it.
- all the spam and seo crap keyword comments are going to be back and frankly I’m possibly more annoyed by this and will spend some time going through and removing them.
- the reply button works but seems to drop you back to the bottom of the page (I’ll work this one out)
A couple of cool things though:
- the flying monkeys are back (if you don’t know what I’m talking about leave a comment with a valid email and you’ll soon see)
- commentluv is active again
So the grand experiment is over. I really liked the service and I think that I would still recommend it but it’s not for me as I get really picky about these types of problems. It should be said that it could be my fault somehow too but then that is probably a good reason to drop it as well.
Just a quick side note too, you may have noticed some advertising showing up on the site and a great way of supporting the site is by clicking on some of them and seeing where they lead, so please don’t be shy!
For those of you who have visited this blog before you will notice a difference in the blog layout and theme tonight (it’s night as I type this).
For those of you have visited this blog for a while you would have noticed my predilection towards changing my theme semi-often. I mean I try and maintain a general theme and just do variations but I like change.
For those of you who have never been here before… ummm HI!!! You should leave a comment and break the ice so we can all get to know you!! But otherwise this post will mean very little to you.
So what’s the go??
Well I needed a change which has already been established and I wasn’t happy with the back end workings of the previous theme. It required me learning a whole new way of handling WordPress so I decided that it was never going to happen because I like using WordPress the way I do.
My favourite theme designer doesn’t do it anymore so I actually bought a Premium template from themeforest. I just don’t have the time to go building my own theme and frankly I haven’t done it for a while so it is all just a pain. On the flip side though I get to support someone who does have the time and is working very hard making WordPress look better etc.
So I’m all okay with that.
That doesn’t mean that it’s all done though, this is a really good base theme but I have a long list of tweaks to do in the coming months to make it Quit Your Day Job. But I was drawn to this theme for a couple of reasons:
- it’s a wide theme so I can accommodate wider YouTube videos and images, I apologise to you guys who have smaller screens but that’s just the way it’s going to roll.
- it’s a very clean design and it’s very well commented so fixing it up* is going to be generally pain free.
- it’s got a neat Twitter feed thing at the bottom of the page which I like.
- it’s also got my social media links down the bottom as well.
- I’ve got some options with advertising, my sidebars and my widgets that make more sense to me.
So some of what the new site will do is a bit of a mystery and I’m looking forward to giving it a run, hopefully for longer than the previous one. I feel a bit Doctor Who’ish with the TARDIS control room.
* I want to point out that in no way does the theme need ‘fixing’ I just like to customise
