I write this as a member of the Rice University Class of 2011. =)

Merry Christmas! After moving my blog to bluehost, courtesy of my brother Daniel, I’m now in the process of upgrading this WordPress installation to the latest stable release. This has been stuck in 1.5.x “land” for far too long. You will probably experience hiccups somewhere, and the layout in particular may (will) suffer, so I’ll be working on fixing those problems too. I don’t plan on creating a new layout immediately, but that will be taken care of as soon as possible.

Also, comments have been off since yesterday to prevent getting comment spam during the whole process since my spam filters are necessarily off. This will hopefully be remedied by using 2. 0.x and thus being able to use Akismet. See you in a bit!

UPDATE (2:26 PM CST): I think the transition is complete. The next goal is a new, simple layout written from the ground up, but I should probably fix my desktop computer first.

As of now, it looks like I’ll eventually move away from 1and1 hosting, when it becomes close to the time my free package runs out. Reuben said he would get Godaddy hosting for a CCX website/board in the works, and that raised my attention– there must be a reason why he wants to get their hosting.

When I came home and checked, the $3.95/month offer didn’t look too bad. It comes with 500MB disk space, 25GB of bandwidth per month, a MySQL database, and PHP support. It will run on Linux, and so I assume Apache will be used. However, one thing I’m not too sure about is if they have a domain/subdomain limit like 1and1, or will I have unlimited? I’ll check on this later, perhaps when the time comes in two years, when I will have to start paying for hosting this blog. Or perhaps there will be a better, cheaper service at that time. Older technology gets cheaper, after all.

Compared to Godaddy, the cheapest 1and1 package is at around $5/month, and it has no PHP or MySQL support. If I’m paying for webspace at all, I assume I should get those features at the very least! PHP or MySQL are so essential for various websites these days. They are the backbone of popular scripts like Wordpress (which I use for this blog), PHPNuke, PostNuke, Nucleus, Drugal, vBulletin, phpBB, Invision, XMB, and FusionNews.

I hope it won’t be a hassle to move this blog. I want to keep my old posts, unlike last time. My previous blog (at macroz.net) still has its posts on a computer in my house. I didn’t bother uploading the database to 1and1 and importing them. If and when I change hosts in two years, I would probably download all the files from my 1and1 FTP account, upload them to the new host, export the whole MySQL database I had, and import that to the new MySQL server. This should hopefully ensure that nothing breaks, but something is bound to happen (as usual) in the process.

In the mean time, before time runs out, cheers to it being a bit more than a year since I joined 1and1, and to another two years with them (free)!

// Now Playing: Goldenscan - Only With You / genre: Trance <– set rip from ASOT 185

Yesterday I fixed my blog’s layout to make it valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. This means not only using all CSS and layers and having no tables (which I haven’t had in a while, now), but correct errorless code in the xhtml layout. I have also had the CSS validated, so it’s all good now! As you can also see, I’ve changed some parts of the layout as well, and now everything should look uniform in both IE (yuck) and Firefox. The primary reason why I’ve had to spend so much time on my CSS layout is because of IE and its nonstandard CSS. Anyway, I’ve made progress, so… Congratulations, me! Go D!

What does D mean? You tell me! Here’s another photo I took in Causeway Bay in Hong Kong:

Now Playing: Fire & Ice - Para Siempre (Dynamic Sense Remix) / genre: Trance