Geek Swagger.
DaveKemick.com
New theme!
Aug 22nd
Hey everyone. I'm just testing out the blog's new theme...leave a comment and let me know if you like it or not. =)
Earlier today I said I'd have my review of Haze up tomorrow, and that's still the plan. I've finished that post and it's all set to go so check back tomorrow if you want to know what I thought about the game!
And we’re back.
Aug 21st
Alright so if you've followed my blog at all you'll have noticed that I haven't posted for a week or two. A total shame that is. I promise that I wasn't neglecting the blog out of laziness or lack of interest - quite the opposite. I have plenty of topics I want to write posts about but I haven't been able to. Originally I suspected that GoDaddy was at fault because I was unable to FTP into my blog or even check it from any of my computers. Obviously that poses a bit of a problem.
So, as I said, I got a hold of GoDaddy to see if they knew what the trouble was. They had me do a traceroute to see where the problem was occuring and they found out that it was actually an issue with my ISP. That doesn't really surprise me in hindsight because, had this problem been GoDaddy's fault, it would have been the first time in 2 years that I've ever had any issues with their hosting. That being said they were very helpful with troubleshooting the problem even though they weren't the cause.
I emailed my ISP to see what the deal was hoping against hope that I wouldn't have to call and talk to someone just to complain because my little blog was inaccessible. I knew for a fact that it was an issue specific to them because could get to it through an external ISP but was unable to get to it from his machines that were using the same ISP as mine. For confidentiality's sake I'm not going to name them but if you know me or where I reside you can probably guess.
Anyways, as I said I emailed them but didn't seem to ever get the problem solved. Then, tonight, literally just now, I tested it and I could get to my blog again. Ta-da!! I'm not sure if it was because I was hounding them to fix it or if an issue just worked itself out but I'm back. Expect the usual schedule to pick back up on Thursday and, as I've said, I have a lot of different plans for posts, videos, and live streaming in the future.
Stay tuned!
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Blog upgrades, my new favorite WordPress plugin
May 27th
This will be kind of a boring post, I apologize. That being said I'm writing this on Memorial Day (yesterday, by the time this goes up) so you have to cut me some slack! It's completely beautiful out. May weather is finally here. Here's what I'm going to talk about today: WordPress. Last Friday I finally upgraded this blog to the latest version of the WordPress blogging software (2.5.1). It's something I've been meaning to do for a long time but when you look back at a year's worth of work you kind of become wary about tempting fate. It was the sort of thing where, sure, it seemed easy enough but if I lost my posts from the past year (however low their quality) I'd be a little angry. That being said I needed to upgrade because I'm planning on some additions to the blog in the coming months and I figured to minimize risk of compatibility issues it would be smart to be using whatever's current. So then, how did it go?
Quite well, actually. and I have to say all I really did was follow their steps right down the list. The most important part of their tutorial are the first two steps - backing your blog up. The first thing I did was FTP'd into my hosting surface and pulled down a local copy of the entire /blog directory. I made a couple copies just to be sure. Then, I backed up WordPress' database. The backup was hosted in the cloud though, so I was a little nervous about not having a local copy but what can you do. After backing up I started in on the actual upgrade process, starting with downloading the latest version of the WordPress software () and deactivating all of my old plugins. Once that's taken care of the hardest work comes - you have to go through and make sure you delete all of the old files you don't need anymore while keeping important WordPress files that keep all of the existing information about your blog. The important files to keep, without going into too much detail, are the wp-config.php file in the root of your blog and everything in the wp-content folder aside from themes and plugins you may want to get rid of. There are some others (again, reference the walkthrough) but a lot of them apply to much older versions of WordPress then the one I was upgrading from (2.1).
After that's done it's basically a matter of uploading all of the new files via FTP. Once all of the new files are up your blog should be back up and running. You can go ahead and reactivate your older plugins and do whatever you need to do. Basically the lesson I learned from all of this was that the WordPress software is much heartier than I expected. I didn't have any problems at all regarding the upgrade itself, everything went smooth and, as you can tell, the blog is running fine now. A lot of the changes were aesthetic, the new dashboard is much prettier than the older one, plus there have been a ton of features added to the actual editor which makes me happy to use the default WYSIWYG to write posts. My favorite feature is the ability to take the editor full-screen, so it almost makes it seem like you're working from a word processor or desktop blogging application like Live Writer. Pretty good stuff.
After everything was up and running again the first thing I did was add a new plugin I heard about on , a podcast on the . The plugin has to do with blog comments, a feature of this blog that I find a little too underused! Let me start off by making a comparison - I've made posts before saying that I like execution of microblogging more than . The two main reasons for that are that it looks prettier and also the way they do replies is so much more intuitive than Twitter. With Pownce if you reply to someone's message it's displayed on a threaded page that's kind of like a forum. I find this format much easier to read and comprehend - that's what this plugin does for blog comments. It's called .
Installing Disqus is just like installing any other plugin, just upload it into the plugins directory on your WordPress blog and then activate it in the dashboard. Boom, you immediately have threaded comments on your blog without any fuss. Of course this is completely useless if someone doesn't leave a comment every now and again, so do me a favor and leave one! You can do so by clicking the link right below the title of this post where it says "# comments" where # is the number of comments that have been posted so far. Let me know Disqus works! I'll start it out by leaving my own comment, and hopefully that will spark some discussion. =)
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Music – a la carte or subscription?
Mar 28th
Okay so I'm sitting here in between classes inside of wonderful Hanley Library, and I just finished reading something about the potential for Apple to integrate new subscription-based plans into iTunes. What that means is that, for a monthly/yearly fee, you'd be able to download all the music you wanted. The only drawback is you don't have a physical copy of the music so if you stop paying the subscription for example, you'll lose it all. This has been around for a while via services like Rhapsody and more recently the Zune, which lets you pay a monthly fee for unlimited music downloads from the Zune store, and I used to think it was cool. Now with Apple threatening to pull the same move I'm sort of concerned about everyone making this jump and then being unable to actually own music anymore.
When I heard the Zune had a subscription service where you could grab all you wanted so that, in theory, you could get a zune one day and have it full of music within a few hours, I thought it was pretty cool. Now I think I've sort of stopped loving the idea so much. It's not secret that I download most of my music from Amazon these days, but the nicest thing about that is that I have physical MP3's that I can share between devices. Also, if I decide I don't want to be a customer of Amazon one day down the road I'll still have my music. So really all I have to say is that I hope this music subscription thing doesn't take off...please let me own my music!
Sorry for the quick unscheduled rant but I didn't want to do a well thought-out post about this since I've already had other similar posts. The secondary purpose of this post is for me to remind anyone who's reading that on Saturday I'll have yet another game review. Come back and check it out! If you like what you read leave a comment on the post or email me at dmkemick(at)live(dot)com. Tomorrow's review, just so you guys know in advance, will be of Condemned 2: Bloodshot for the Xbox 360. I don't know if I'll have another gaming review next weekend though, I haven't really made any significant progress on the games I've been playing this week. Still, I plan to continue doing these reviews as regularly as I can.
As always, thanks for reading. 
One more thing
Mar 14th
Alright I just wanted to make one more post because I'm trying to optimize some of the ads on this blog. Without going too commercial on anyone reading, I'd really just like to pull in enough cash to pay for the hosting every month. I've had a Google ad down at the bottom of the sidebar that has generated absolutely no revenue, so before I give up on Google adsense I just wanted to go all-out and see if it's worth messing with.
Anyways, I integrated a new WordPress adsense plugin to sort of punch in some adsense code wherever I'd like. Hopefully this is an example of the plugin working splendidly:
Of course I'll only know after I hit that Publish button...
Categories
Mar 14th
Just a quick post to let everyone know that I finally got around to splitting out the categories for my posts. It may not seem like a big deal but I'm glad I finally took care of it because it's been bugging me. When I first set up my blog I only created about 5 categories for posts, and as I've continued to post I've realized that 95% of my posts fell into two of those categories: Tech, and Gaming.
Now I have about 15 post categories ranging in specific topics so that if a user wants to search my archives by category it will be a lot more useful. Thanks as always.
The beauty of Akismet.
Feb 26th
Man, I can't believe I didn't catch on to this sooner. This blog tends to get hit hard by spam...it started off slow, maybe one or two messages a day, and then it ramped up to around 15+. The good and bad thing about that is that I can halt comments from being posted until after I've reviewed them. This is great because anyone who reads anything here doesn't have to look at Viagra ads, but bad because the process of marking a comment as spam and then banning the IP address that posted it is long and arduous. It got so bad that I eventually had to set up a different folder in my email client that I automatically forwarded all messages from my blog into, otherwise my mail was 75% comment spam.
It got to a point where I was fed up and started to look for a good spam plugin for WordPress. Of course like any internet user these days I just googled and the third result was on the written by the WordPress crew themselves. They enlightened me to a little plugin that is installed by default with most WordPress installations called , and said that it would more than likely dodge most comment spam. I went ahead and activated Akismet (for WordPress users, it's as easy as logging into WordPress and then going to the plugin tab) and since then I haven't seen a single piece of comment spam.
I'm pretty excited about this. I'd say at least half of my interaction with the blog was getting rid of comment spam as opposed to writing posts so this will be a time saver. My only problem is that I tend not to get a whole lot of comments of the genuine nature so I'm not sure if Akismet is just going crazy blocking everyone's comments or if it really is doing its job. If someone (or multiple someones) could do me a favor and leave a comment I'd really appreciate it! Help put my mind at ease. =)
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That’s it, I’m shutting it down!
Nov 9th
This is a special Friday edition post, one I didn't plan on doing at all but I have something I have to share. A few minutes ago I was just sitting here listening to some tunes and browsing the web. I went ahead and checked out my Google Analytics to see what kind of traffic I'm pulling and...well...just have a look for yourself. The image's thumbnail is to the left of the second paragraph and if you click on it you'll see the full version.
This certainly can't bode well! Thanks as always to the brave souls that visit this blog! As you can see from the handy little chart the numbers are definitely up and I have a feeling I know why. To get above even 12 hits is a shocker for me to be honest. See you on Tuesday. =)
Stick to the schedule!
Oct 11th
For the past two weeks I've been trying to maintain a blogging schedule. Before I established one I found that I either would go for long amounts of time without posting anything or I'd have to rush a post mid-week. I didn't really like having either of those things happen so I figured it was time to get serious and commit to a schedule. I've been testing out a 2 post a week (Tuesday and Thursday) schedule and it seems to be working pretty well. I don't really have enough to say for more than 2 posts a week, and Tuesday and Thursday are situated in the week nicely enough for readers I think.
Especially since classes started back up I don't have as much time to dedicate to writing unfortunately, but I am comfortable putting up 2 a week while knowing that eventually if I had a consistent readership they would get used to the format, and I wouldn't have to pressure myself more. As a result of having class and work during the week what I do now is write my posts over the weekend (Saturday, usually), format them sometime before they go up (usually Saturday also but it depends, seeing as how the formatting part is my least favorite), and then use WordPress' handy to set when they go live. This is a really handy tool to have and I'm glad I started using it. The time I have set for now is 8:00AM eastern, so if everything goes to plan you should see something new around that time on Tuesday and then again on Thursday. The only downside of writing this way is that I feel like I'm not being as current as I could be. For example, if something is announced on Saturday and I write about it, there are 3 days before my post goes live so a lot of what I write about might be disproved or modified in that time. I'll try my best to avoid that situation though, and hopefully what you read won't be too stale.
So there you have it! I think it's important to have a solid schedule for anyone who posts content to the internet regularly, that way anyone who is interested knows when to show up. It's all about consistency. I think the reason I value consistency so much is that I'm a and some of the comics I read aren't very consistent time-wise. They have schedules, sure, but sometimes you'll check their site to see if the new comic is up and it won't be there until almost night time. That can be frustrating for me as a reader of their particular works, so I assume it would be frustrating for a blog reader as well.
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