Twev1701.net

Tonight I have the whole house to myself. Jess is staying at her mother’s house tonight since she was going to her dad’s house in Easton after work for dinner. I won’t be seeing her until about 9pm tomorrow night.

I was looking through the stats the the site tonight, and I noticed that the stats are finally starting to increase again. Granted, they aren’t nearly at the number that they were when I was forced to change hosts (old host could not accomodate my bandwidth), but they are finally headed in the right direction. Our vacation last year was paid almost entirely with my Google AdSense check, but unless I start seeing some serious traffic, I don’t see that happening again anytime soon. Back then, I was averaging about $1 a day in ad revenue. Right now, I have made almost $29 since July. Granted, this is all free money for literally doing almost nothing, but at the same time, it’s not what I was used to back then.

Trying to drum up traffic is a really tough thing for a site that is nothing more than pretty much a personal blog with some pretty pics of women. I have been thinking about over-hauling the site, but part of me doesn’t want to. The site’s really not broken, aside from a few loading issues I need to work on.

I think I like the site just the way it is.

It’s Thanksgiving today, and one of my favorite holidays! It’s literally the only holiday where all you have to do all day is eat. Oh, and eat I will!

Today we have dinner with my family at 12:30pm, and then dinner with Jess’s family in New Jersey at 5:00pm. 2 dinners, 2 family, 2 states, and 1 very happy Twev.

This year I have a lot to be thankful for. I have a new, loving wife. I have 4 cats who are great companions. I have a business that is finally starting to finds its way in the nitty-grtity world of, well, business. I have great friends who on my wedding day, really showed me what friendship was.

Now, if I only had about $2 million, I would be the most thankful man in the world! But, money aside, and I still one of the luckiest men on the planet. Well…Pennsylvania at least. Ok….Hanover Green.

I’m looking at my “Site History” page to try and get some ideas for streamlining this page a bit, and it wasn’t until I really starting looking at all the designs that I realized that all of these designs are semi-autobiographical. What the hell do I mean? Well, allow me to explain…trust me, we have the time.

If you look at the page…go ahead and open it up in a new tab in Firefox (you’d better be using Firefox!) so you can follow along. Good…now let’s start.

If you look at the first design of my site, I can tell you just what my life was like then. At that time I was just about to lose my job at The Wall (store closing), and I had decided to collect for a few months and find a direction for my life. This was my first experience with blogging. I was using a CGI script called NewsPro. It was really good back then, and served its purpose very well. I also made a few pages for some of the members of the female gender that I liked, as well as a separate site for our well though out, but never filmed Star Wars fan film, “Shadows In The Reign”. It was also the first place I ever posted a picture I would call PG-13 after my ex left me. It wasn’t of her, but of Jenny McCarthy. It was an act of rebellion/celebration for finally being free of 7 years of repression. I also had a fun little real-time indicator to see if I was on ICQ or not. Very fun times.

The next 2 blue designs for “Smith Fest” and my site go hand in hand. JP and I had decided to hold a “Smith Fest” and we decided to make a site for it. I literally threw this together in about 20 minutes inside of Frontpage. This is probably my fastest site design ever. The sad part is, if I recall, this is the design that was up the longest. I also started playing around with graphics for the site in Photoshop. I took a picture of me resting my arms on one of my kitchen chairs, then Photoshopped out the chair, repainted my legs, and then separated my body into 2 parts. What this allowed me to do was to put my lower body behind the text for my site, and them put my top half over the top of the letters. This gave the convincing illusion that I was really leaning on these letters. I later expanded this to other things, and even would change the background to suit what was going in my life at the time. In hindsight, this was probably my most fun layout in that I was constantly changing it. This was also the firstlayout I did with my “Weekly Wallpapers” that have become so popular. There’s some trivia for you!

My next layout was the black one below Static-Fusion. This was a sun site in that I decided to code everything with some Java and CGI. I had random banners that would show up, an auto-uploading wallpaper system, and a nice wallpaper archive. However, the site’ biggest downfall was the fact that it wasn’t all that expandable because of the heavy scripting. If memory serves, I went back to the blue layout for a while after this one.

The next layout was important for a few reasons. First, I left NewsPro behind and went to an actual blogging suite call MovableType. It was nice, and gave me a lot more options then I ever had with NewsPro. This theme was a modified Matrix theme I found online. I really started to spend all of my free time online at this point, and it showed. I had links to the right that showed what was the last movie I bought, what book I was reading, and what game I was playing. And, as an added bonus, all of these pictures linked to my Amazon.com merchant account, which meant that if you bought something from one of my links, I got a kick back. This was a great time in my life since I was gaming a lot with JP. Also, this is where I started to leave the old Trev behind. What I mean by that is the Trev from the 1990s…the high school Trev. I was finally starting to evolve into a new, better person. This design totally says winter to me since I remember making tons of posts at this time.

I think that’s enough looking back right now. I’m sure I’m boring the shit out of everyone. For now, I’m going to go back to seeing how I can streamline the site. Later….

I am literally just that — sick and tired.

I’ve been fighting off a cold since before the wedding, and I did battle with it at the end of our Honeymoon. However, on Tuesday night, that killer virus whipped out the freakin’ BFG on my ass. I have a nice combination of sore throat, no voice, congestion followed by nasal drip, and a nice sinus headache. Add all of that up and you can see that I’m an constantly tired from the beating my body is taking. This really sucks…

This weekend is a busy one. We’re heading down to the farm tomorrow morning with Jess’s dad and Jess’s grandfather. After that, we’re headed back here to changed and then down to her dad’s house in Easton for dinner with the family. After that, who knows. But, it’s a pretty full day for someone who has a hard enough time getting around.

In fact, I think that’s where I’m headed right now. Jess is on her way home and that couch is looking mighty inviting. Time to a nap. zzzzz……

Last night was the first night I was on the computer since before the wedding. While true, I have been posting wedding and honeymoon pics on Flickr, last night was the first night I actually got some work done and got back into my old routine.

It feels good to get back to my ‘normal’.

The house is still a wreck from the wedding and honeymoon, but slowly it’s getting back to a habitable state.

In fact, I should be cleaning right now, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Plus, I have tomorrow off, and my favorite saying is “why do today what you can put off until tomorrow”. Plus, I need to setup a few more backups of various files since I have a few hundred wedding pics I really don’t want to lose. I’ll eventually drop them all to disc, but as nice as that is, I have a problem with keeping large amounts of files on disc. It’s damned inconveinant to try and look for that 1 files on a whole disc of files. So what I like to do is use a little program called Cobian that does nightly backups to my server. I doubt that my main system and my server will ever crash and burn within the same 24 hours period, so I feel this is a nice alternative since I can still browse all of the files on the network at anytime.

I know I’m going to be in trouble with the wife when she gets home if I don’t get anything done, but hopefully she’ll be too tired to notice. Hopefully… o_O