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FeaturesBrian Moy's PageFeaturesCompressing JavaScript files breaks themI spent some time today doing some webpage load speed tests to see how fast certain pages load.As I've added more and more, I kind of had the concern that there was so much on there it would take a... Click to read full story. New 2009 Calendar Banners w/ mouseover expand effectSpent some time today to spread word around the site about the 2009 Calendars. I spent a lot of time to think up and create the design so I hope people sign up to get em. Last year, I thought... Click to read full story. Talk Boards - Down for maintenance January 1, 2009I came across an issue a couple days ago where I was locked out of my own domains due to some kind of posting error on the Talk Boards. Member Sn0wX mentioned a similar error, which may or may not... Click to read full story. Added little note below "Don't Forget" bannerI added a little(You can unsubscribe from the list at any time) (You can unsubscribe from the list at any time)below the banner with the thought that it might be good to emphasize that people who sign up for the... Click to read full story. Weblog software upgradedUpdated my Movable Type install (finally) from the beta to the latest stable commercial release. Movable Type Commercial version 4.21-en with: Professional Pack 1.2. Let's hope it fixes some of the "bugs" that seemed to show up. Such as the... Click to read full story. Web Log installation to be updated sometimeI have been putting this off due to the troubleshooting that always seems to be necessary for any upgrade, but sometime by the end of next week I will upgrade the Movable Type installation (Features and ProgLog sections) to Movable... Click to read full story. Upgraded to MT4.2RC, moved the entire install and files to Specialty GamerI've made a lot of changes to things in the past few days - hopefully the transition is smooth and unnoticable to everyone else.Just a few days ago, my webhost provider, Acornhost, made a change to the server upgrading to... Click to read full story. Updated Newsletter signup formWell well, I know its a long time coming to post an update. I mostly just post on my Talk Boards as its much faster to do so.So, today I updated my Newsletter Signup form to emphasize the free bumper... Click to read full story. Added two new pluginsSome occasional comment spam has been creeping in time to time. I installed TypePad's new AntiSpam plugin which will hopefully cut down on the spam even more. Also, installed Copy! plugin to copy MT templates.... Click to read full story. Added Game Collection Tips section to the Talk BoardsI am back from Jet City Retro. Fun time.Thought of plenty of good ideas for Specialty Gamer and etc. One of them was to add game collection tips section to the talk boards. Basically the idea being for people share... Click to read full story. Talk Boards about to openI realize I've been neglecting to post on my Progress Journal here. I have been working past few weeks on the Talk Boards, which I think are just about ready to open. I need to adjust all the links and... Click to read full story. Clarified some headings.I never particularly cared for the term "archives" which is used by default in my MT installation. So I changed the name of the [section name] Archives to [section name] Full Index. And from [section name] Index to [section name]... Click to read full story. Installed Simple Machines ForumChecking out the selection of open source forums, it was between phpBB, DeluxeBB, and SimpleMachinesForum. I went with Simple Machines forum basically by process of elimination - and I liked the format of SMF.... Click to read full story. Added new banner to Links pageAdded portion to say that I swap banners with other websites on the Links page. Also added a new, 2nd banner to choose from. Looks like this.... Click to read full story. Updated Magento to 1.0 retail releaseDid another clean install of Magento to the 1.0 production release, just released today! ... Click to read full story. Updated Privacy PolicyIts been sort of a while since I last posted in the Business Progress Journal, as I have done many various things and sometimes too lazy to record everything.I won't list all the small fixes, as many of them are... Click to read full story. Big optimization on graphic sizes/removed Javascript effect.I was noticing that my webpages often take longer than I'd like to load with the graphics, so I needed to find a good way to cut down on graphic file size. I found a great program called Ignite that... Click to read full story. Microsoft Small Business Summit doesn't work on FireFox - or doesn't work?Upgraded my Magento software to the latest version again. Unsure how to set up my merchant account however, so left a message with my merchant services guy at the bank. Elsewhere, I'm checking out the Microsoft Small Business Summit, a free... Click to read full story. Fixed IE7 issue.Thanks to Josh Parr for alerting me on the IE7 issue. There was an issue where under IE7, when the mouse was rolled over any of the graphic links at the top, the menubar as well as all the body... Click to read full story. Best Restaurants advertisementI was flipping thru my latest issue of Entrepreneur (April, 2008) and found this hilarious (to me) advertisement section for Best Restaurants. Its an eight page spread with the individual restaurants featured being: Papa John's, Quiznos, Boston's The Gourmet Pizza,... Click to read full story. Polished appearance to make pages more readable/browsable.Just some small bits here and there. Noticing that various font sizes were the same so it gave various elements equal focus - when some of those elements should just have background focus, like footer links. Also with so many... Click to read full story. Setup Google AnalyticsSetup Google Analytics on the Specialty Gamer domain. ... Click to read full story. Enabled Captcha (finally figured out how...)Various tweaks to the website.On the dropdown menubar, I added little down arrows to show where certain buttons branch down below. I just rotated the graphic I was using to do the side branch outs, and then added some lines... Click to read full story. New Magento Update installed.Clean install of the latest Magento e-commerce software. With the new release, the .htaccess file was already modified with the script to work on a PHP 4 server so I didn't need to edit it like in the past.... Click to read full story. Finally have appeared to fix the dropdown menu issue in IE 6/7Well, this has been an ongoing issue that's really baffled me for months. Basically since I put up the dropdown menubar. I've gone thru multiple scripts and etc. thinking maybe my script was broken... Well anyways today I seem to... Click to read full story. Spruced up Newsletter template/Blacklisted by BellSouth!I did all these things yesterday, but didn't post because I was working during the day and too tired at the end of the day. I updated the look of the Specialty Gamer Newsletter template. The template is the graphic... Click to read full story. Redesign to add clearer link to Newsletter signupI been meaning to fix the Newsletter Signup portion of the page where its practically invisible down at the bottom. Hopefully these changes today will make it clearer to spot and also a "call out" banner link in the middle... Click to read full story. Added Privacy Policy link to emails.Reading the latest issue of Target Marketing, I read an article by Lou Mastria noting Consumer Notices to be placed wherever a business does their marketing - such as website, emails, direct mailing.... I have all the noted areas mentioned... Click to read full story. Added Author Login link to menubarDecided to add the Author Login link on the webpage. Placed it under Features/Authors/Author Login. At first, I was thinking I didn't want the link to be actually on the website, but now I realise its helpful for it be... Click to read full story. Upgraded 2 MT pluginsUpdated 2 MT plugins to work with MT4.1.User Profiles to 1.6and Template Installer to 1.2Just installed em. Will mess around with the new features of User Profiles later.... Click to read full story. Made upload limit 200kbThe website is on a hosted server, meaning I am paying for a limited amount webspace. So I can't have people uploading 1 MB+ picture files and etc., as that really unnecessary for the internet. (Sorry, Dant!) When I see other... Click to read full story. Details on installing/upgrading Magento.For those that may actually check the ProgLog to see what I'm doing, you may have noticed I haven't posted in here for a while. Its because I've started my own more focused business journal on my personal website. Its... Click to read full story. I Hate SPAM!So as of right now, I have eleven zombie spam comments on Specialty Gamer so far for the current day. (yes, 11!!) Three of them got thru my filters, so all that I've put up isn't working yet. So I... Click to read full story. Movable Type Global Templates are Awesome!!Still figuring out all the new features to MT4.1. One cool thing I'd been meaning to check out is the global templates. For someone with multiple blogs/websites, it used to be a person had to edit each template per blog... Click to read full story. Changed Default Upload Directory in Movable Type 4.1By default, Movable Type uploads files to the root directory. By default, Movable Type will store the file you are uploading in the blog's root directory, but with the "Upload Destination" field you can customize where the system will store... Click to read full story. Added contact box.Well, I gotta say this was a lot more complicated for me to add this than probably should have been. I used Formmail from Matt's Script Archive, said according to the website: FormMail is quite possibily the most used CGI... Click to read full story. Cool Get The Glass board game website.I found this really cool website thru some magazine I read. The post didn't really fit into any of the Specialty Gamer categories, so I put it here. Anyways, the website is called Get The Glass and its a promotional... Click to read full story. The spam kills me!With the anti-spam plugins in place, I still am averaging a spam comment per day. Distressing to me, because I don't even average one real comment per day yet... so I added various "porn" type words to the spam blacklist... Click to read full story. Added spam blocking to comments.Well I would guess that the Specialty Gamer website must be starting to get known since the website has been getting a fake spam comment per day for past five days. By fake comments, I mean like this one: in... Click to read full story. Added Author "How To" page.As I get new authors, I'm already tired of telling each one individually how to do stuff like login, edit their profile and write/edit an entry. So I made up a webpage telling of how to do all that stuff. ... Click to read full story. Movable Type 4.1 is INSTALLED!!The biggest news here of late is that I finally got MT4.1 properly upgraded and installed. If you've been me for the past month or so, then you'd know I've been having frustrations trying to upgrade from MT4.01 to MT4.1... Click to read full story. Upgrading to MT 4.1 from 4.01 (or at least trying).Update Jan 27: Solution found, see here: http://www.specialtygamer.com/proglog/2008/01/movable-type-41-is-installed/ I was sick with cold/flu-like symptoms, and also it had been absurdly cold here in Portland. For those reasons, I didn't get much work done for the past week or so. Since... Click to read full story. Game polls added, discussions to be added.I went and created some various game related polls to the poll sidebar. My first poll to ask people what browser they use/prefer turns out wasn't necessary, as my poll program tells me various info like the browser used by... Click to read full story. My Cascading Style Sheets have errors.As I was looking for something, I found a different thing related to the other thing I was looking for. Looks that my Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) come up with some errors and a lot of warnings, when I enter... Click to read full story. Installed Magento.Just completed installing Magento as my marketplace. I don't know how to design or configure it yet, but I'm just happy to have it up and working. I started the install process last night. As I was going thru the... Click to read full story. Changed Author Log-in screen to fit SpGa theme.I just updated the log-in screen so it has the theme and logo of Specialty Gamer. The weblog is Movable Type and I'd never bothered to change it from the default log-in screen (with Movable Type logos and everything...) that... Click to read full story. E-commerce research.I'm looking up various E-commerce systems and if you look it up "e-commerce" on Google, the # of softwares that come up is mind boggling. And for me, since I never done it before, I wonder - Do I set... Click to read full story. Looking to switch Mailing List manager software. (Nevermind)I've been in not exactly the greatest mood for past week or so, anyways... I'm not so happy w/ phplist, my current mailing list manager software. I used it only because it was already set up thru Fantastico in my... Click to read full story. Lori Grady of Lake Oswego, OR is a bitch.I've dealt a lot on Craigslist, Ebay, trade forums and etc... so I come across people that aren't always the easiest to deal with. But I mostly give people the benefit of the doubt so rarely get bothered by tough... Click to read full story. Added stickers order page and etc.Didn't really get a whole lot of stuff done today. I packed up the free gifts to the nine people on the list I have addresses for. Also, added an order page for people to go to get Specialty Gamer... Click to read full story. Added Privacy Policy page.Did lots of bits of little things today. I added address fields to the Newsletter Signup form, since I need people's addresses for mailing out stuff to them anyways. I should have already had that set up than have to... Click to read full story. Added Magazine Deal of the Day banner.Now that I have a website, I can sign up for affiliate links to products and services that I think visitors to SpGa will find useful - and of course I get a small cut when people either click or... Click to read full story. Stickers are ready for order.Well, I've been sort of lazy on updating the log for the week of Christmas. Mainly because I was just lazy period that week. So since last post, I have received my stickers order. I made a little PayPal checkout... Click to read full story. Trying to repair dropdown menubar under IE.Doing some various repairs. The dropdown menubar needs alternate scripts for IE. Works in every other browser I've tested, but for Internet Explorer, the Javascript tag needs to be outside the closed table. I had it inside the table so... Click to read full story. Created Sitemaps and submitted them to Google.I was editing my Google Custom Search and was noticing not all results came up when I was testing. Looking to see what pages of Specialty Gamer are on Google, there was only 17 results. Ironically, my own start page... Click to read full story. Fancied up menubar.I made the menubar even nicer this morning. Now instead of a single drop down, the Features drops down to categories, then each category branches out again to articles within categories. Also I separated the Search dropdown box and made... Click to read full story. Added "Newsletter Signup" to menu.I don't think the SpGa Newsletter Signup form should be that hard to miss at the bottom, but just in case someone is too lazy to scroll down I also placed a "Newsletter Signup" button to the top menubar. When... Click to read full story. Added social bookmark icon links to posts.Wow, I think this is cool... I just added those social bookmark icons that seem to be so cool these days. Also, there is an "info" link which is the "?" icon to tell you what it all means if... Click to read full story. Added SpGa banner link and links page.I used the link for my emails as a banner link. Typed up the code, figured out how to get it in a copy and paste text box and created a Links page to place it. Looks like this: <a... Click to read full story. Fixed Prog Log styles to match rest of site.Yes, things are looking really good. I just got done fixing all the webpages and stylesheets for the Biz Prog Log to match the rest of the site. You could say the move from my personal site, The Brian Pages... Click to read full story. Added Google as website search engine.I didn't really care for the built-in search I had on my website from Movable Type. My base log is on my personal homepage, The Brian Pages so the search results appear there. I wanted the search results for a... Click to read full story. Added author subdomain redirect pages.Well, as I'm waiting to figure out how to fix my MT4.1 beta upgrade, I'm doing various things I can that don't involve MT4. I just added SpGa author subdomains that redirect to the author index. I'll try to work... Click to read full story. Backend currently down...I just upgraded the Movable Type from 4.01 to a Beta 4.1 release. The bad news about that is that there's currently a bug that won't allow the database to upgrade. I receive the following error message: Error during upgrade:... Click to read full story. Spiffed up the menubar.Added a couple yellow/black fade graphics to the menubar. Sort of looks like a light beam. I dunno, I may change it to something else as it may look a bit too amateurish. Plus, clarified the content a lot by... Click to read full story. John Hancock's The Northwest Gamer now on SpGa.My friend John Hancock sent me the first two of his new Newsletter on gaming he's doing called, "The NorthWest Gamer". Unf., they were in Publisher file format, .pub, which as I looked up is a proprietary file format owned... Click to read full story. Made custom 404 Error page.Designed my own "404 Page Not Found" page to match the style of Specialty Gamer. A nice little thing all well thought out sites have. Now when a person finds a bad link or types a page incorrectly, they get... Click to read full story. Lots o' progress!Yesterday and today I've gotten lots of things done on the website. Yesterday, I scanned the NWCGE 2K7 show program and uploaded it onto the website as a page flip script. You can turn the pages and have it move... Click to read full story. Scanner not working. Arg.I found the power supply to my scanner, but I can't figure out why it won't seem to turn on/be recognised by my computer. The power supply and scanner are warm so I'm guessing that means they're connected. I tried... Click to read full story. Moved the Prog Log to the Specialty Gamer domain.I just moved the Specialty Gamer Biz Prog Log from my personal site to the Specialty Gamer site. As there's plenty of posts there, I was thinking I'll at least have a good amount of content to put there -... Click to read full story. I found the power supply to my scanner!!It took a couple days but I found the power supply to my scanner underneath a pile of CD's. (My whole room is basically a pile of CD's... I gotta clean it up or find a place to put em... Click to read full story. Changed style and borders to match SpGa.With all the work on SpGa, I really haven't done much to spruce up the Biz Prog Log. Its a little tricky as the Biz Prog Log still uses MT3.2 templates and SpGa uses MT4 templates. I'm not in the... Click to read full story. Got the scanner on my desk.I cleared out some space, grabbed the scanner, cleaned it off, put it on my desk and... I don't know where the power supply is... Arg... ... Click to read full story. Lots of details being fixed up.This weekend totally sucked for me. I pretty much had to sleep/stay in bed for both days due to upset stomach/nausea/diarrhea/dizziness and I'm still sort of feeling it. The sickness itself honestly does not bother me; what bother's me is... Click to read full story. Did a TON of work on the website today.Man, I got a bunch of things completed on the website today. One major thing for me, is that I finally figured out how to get a graphic border around my webpages. I mean, I know how to add a... Click to read full story. ITEC was ok.I went to ITEC yesterday. Got to see the two main speakers do presentations. The second guy, Kim Brand of FileEngine did a nice presentation on open source software. I got plenty of good suggestions from him. But aside from... Click to read full story. Made some new graphics.I am up way too late tonight... being that ITEC is tomorrow morning. But I had a really good idea that kept me from sleeping so I had to go to my computer. I got the idea to make have... Click to read full story. ITEC coming to Portland in two days.Well, I'm a day away from ITEC which is an annual IT convention for businesses that run websites. I went last year and to be honest, most of the people there are executives, IT people and older people who run... Click to read full story. Found the printer I was looking for.Today (And by today, I mean yesterday. I've been working on the site all night.) I was lucky to find just the laser printer I was looking for at Free Geek. Picked up a HP 6MP for $40. The... Click to read full story. Page styles are looking great!I've been doing a bunch of work on the CSS and templates all day today and I'm happy so far w/ the looks. I decided the drop down menu script I was using was too complex, so I found a... Click to read full story. (Almost) happy w/ header.I added a smaller version of my JS fade logo to my header for the home page click navigation. Also, I figured out why my drop down menu wasn't working right. Two columns that were supposed to be empty, I... Click to read full story. Bits of work on SpGa.Over the weekend, I did a few various things. Added copyright notice to bottom of pages. Removed logo from CSS, added to header as clickable link to start page. May do the JS fade thing there. I dunno... don't want... Click to read full story. |
