Sorry I haven’t been around much, friends… For the last few days I’ve felt a bit down, and thus very, very tired. Pile that on top of the fact that I’ve been working late every day AND my sociology class is nutso full of homework AND I’m studying for my A+ and you get an Alex that does nothing social.
I’m feeling better now (otherwise I wouldn’t bother blogging), and really need to get abck to work, but I just wanted everyone to know that I’m still alive and kicking 
I’ve finally decided which of my projects I’m going to actually take the time to finish up. I’m really excited about getting things working and all that fun stuff
Anyway, what I’m going to be working on is getting IndyMeetups.info up and running AND being useful.
Heck, one of these days I may even get a chance to use my favorite domain, lunchis.at…
Anyway, I leave you with a bit of a teaser…
Since I’m not Twittering, I had to come up with some way to post quick little snippets so that you all could find them.
These are somewhere between twitter posts and normal blog posts, they’ll carry a lot more thought and will be filtered better.
So, what did I find that was so important to make a note of and share?
I just wanted to tell everyone that yesterday’s episode of House really hit home (yes, I just finished watching). I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next week in the House / Cuddy dynamic… Maybe I’ve got something to look forward to after all.
Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably been introduced to the term Love in one way or another. Love is an integral part of our culture, and something that is just too important to ignore.
I plan on writing quite a bit on the subject, hence why I have a whole category and nify image.
I’d like your comments, so feel free to Contact Me and let me know your thoughts 
I used 1and1 as a webhost and registrar for a few months late last year when Dreamhost was having some issues. Sure, the server ran fine, but the control panel was hard to use and cutstomer service sucked. After Dreamhost got past their dry spells and I switched my domains back over there I put in an account cancellation request for when my account was done.
Well, I kind of forgot about it, since it was almost 6 months before the date at wich my account was supposed to be cancelled, and I assumed they would send an email or something.
I was wrong. Check it out, alexconner.name no longer resolves. They deleted my registration and now I have to snag it before someone else buys it. They can’t get me an AUTH code to transfer it, so it will be down for probably a couple of weeks.
Please don’t send email or try and visit alexconner.name - I KNOW it’s down, and there isn’t anything I can do about it but warn you to NEVER DO BUSINESS WITH 1and1. Their customer service has been very unhelpful in this issue.
Today was a pretty crazy day at work. I had tons of tickets when I started up my computer, and made several phone calls. I got everything all scheduled up and then set to work, and actually got enough done to do some getting ahead.
I was feeling pretty good about my day, all the way up until about 3:00… Yep… A migrane hit… Then I realized that I have sociology class tonight (where I’m sitting right now). Yeah, crap is right. This is the sociology class that has 16 weeks worth of work to do in, oh, 5 weeks…
Anyway, I’ll have to get going because with 1xRTT it’s going to take the last 2 minutes I have to post this.
Take care everyone!
Ok, so I picked the theme that I’m using now for a very specific reason - that jiffy javascript menubar at the top of most pages. I wanted to be able to use that for some very neat things, and the fact that it’s powered by MooTools makes me pretty excited. I plan on learning a lot more cool Javascript stuff to do some cool AJAX implimentations of Wordpress functions in the future.
But, all of this Javascript and AJAX do have the possiblility to have a negative impact speed-wise for my visitors. Likewise, the larger number of images and multimedia inside my posts will carry a larger payload. To combat these negative effects, I have started implimenting some very handy tricks that some of the “big boys” use.
First off, all of my CSS, JS and Image files are being served off of a subdomain, i.alxconn.com. This subdomain is set up for far-future content expiration, .js and .css gzip compression, cache-control headers, e-tags off, and last-modified date off. This is all easily accomplished by editing the .htaccess file, and the benefits are mostly in taking advantage of the user’s browser cache. Also, the compression of .js and .css files allows them to be transferred across the wire much more quickly.
For information on how to do these with Apache, feel free to check out these links:
I was able to easily re-map all uploads from within the Wordpress interface to point to the i.alxconn.com subdomain as well, so the speed increases will also come from within posts.
To speed up the server-side performance of Wordpress, I am using very few plugins (in fact, only Aksimet and WP-Super-Cache) and some heavy caching. WP-Super-Cache is set up for 2 hour page expiration, lock-down (doesn’t re-generate pages for comments), and gZipping page contents.
Altogether, this gets page load times down to rival nearly every other website that I’ve been browsing this morning, even on my wiked-fast internet connection at work. I hope that the speed improvements are very apparent to people on slower DSL, EvDO / CDMA, and Dial-Up connections!
Hang in there for more cool posts about making Wordpress more performant - and keep in mind, this is all hosted on a shared server at Dreamhost!
You probably noticed that I deleted my Twitter accounts. And my Facebook account.
That’s right, they’re gone.
Why on earth did I do it? Well, first off, I’m NOT mad at you. You didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m not holding a grudge or anything like that. I’m being 100% honest, and if you still don’t belive me, contact me and let me know.
But why DID I do it? Easy. Twitter has gotten to a point where I use it primarily to vent my frustrations, but in such a generalized way that nobody even knows what’s wrong. Sure, we all need to talk about our feelings, but there are appropriate ways to do it.
Also, Twitter has become a source of frustration for me. Various things said on Twitter (and since I’m not in an acusitory mood tonight, I won’t say what) have caused me great frustrations, and some have even upset me quite a lot.
Then there’s time. I’ve been spending so much time on Twitter that it has been changing my workflows and making me very, very inefficient. I’ve even developed a Twitter mentality in my work life. I sub-conciously try and distill everything that I’m going to say down into as short of a phrase as possible, and that’s creating a lot of frustration in of itself. When you take out all the “un-neccisary words” from a sentence, you can influence its meaning and spirit.
But why Facebook? Once again, Facebook has been a source of “time wasting.” I’ll log in to Facebook, knowing that nobody has messaged me or invited me to anything useful - several times a day.
All this wasted time from Facebook and Twitter need to be focused onto more important things, like taking the time to write a real email to a friend who is feeling down, or sending a text to someone letting them know one-on-one that I care - and not for the “awws” from friends.
Rather than one-offing a “I hate myself more than you can imagine” tweet, I should take the time to explain in a real blog post where my lack of self confidence comes from. Rather than saying “Uggh, I’m so bored here at work” I should try and get ahead. Rather than saying “I wish somebody would text me back…” I should make a phone call.
So, all in all, what I’m trying to do is the “right” thing. You may not have fallen into the pitfalls that I have with social networking and Twitter, and if that’s the case I’m very proud of you. I just want you to take a minute and think about your usage of these tools, and decide if you’re using them well or if you’re just being destructive.
I love all of my friends, and welcome any comments that anyone in the interwebs would like to share.
I’ve decided to re-purpose my blog once again. Rather than having separate blogs all over the place, I’m bringing everything under the alxconn.com domain. This will have the benefits of easier management and care and feeding, fewer domains to own and keep up, and beter overall quality of the site.
I’m going to be optimizing this theme quite a bit over the next few weeks, then I will begin building content out. For the meantime, you’ll probably just want to hang in there and check back later. Feel free to subscribe to this blog using your RSS reader of choice, or soon I will be adding email support.
Thanks for your patience and understanding during this transition.