Chelle is right. I’ve said it twice. I have not been doing anything with this blog for the last couple of months. Why? I’ve been busy. I graduate with my Master’s degree in a couple of weeks. I’ve been doing work for the school I work at. Any free time has been spent with my family and friends. I just haven’t had time to do much of anything here. Not to say I haven’t been working on the blog though.

If you look at the main site, http://saphrym.com, you’ll notice there is a placeholder theme there. I’ve been working on the design in the background. That will be the new location of the blog once I am finished. I have three main passions in life: family, teaching, and writing. The new blog (yes, this one will “queitly” disappear, but not completely) will focus on the writing. I plan on having anecdotes, editorials, creative writing, etc. I will be doing some editing on posts already on this blog to make them just a little bit better for the new blog.

Also, the ads will be going away. I no longer care if the blog makes money. Why? Becuase I feel as if it’s been commercial and it just doesn’t fit me well. You’ll find no paid links on the new blog. You’ll find no ads. There is one exception to this though: While  working on the blog over the last couple of years, I have made some friends who I would like to support. So I will be using CMFAds to support them and to support the bloggers that use them. These friends are people like Turnip, Stan, and Ben. Yes, I have made others also who are linked in my blogroll. Most of the friends I have made are now part of CMFAds, so I will keep that service. They will remain my exclusive ad service.

When will this all happen? I don’t know. Maybe soon. Maybe in the Summer. I just don’t know. I’ll take a line from Blizzard Entertainment and say: “When it’s done.” But I will try and keep my readers up to date until then. Don’t worry. It will happen. After all, I spent good money on the theme I’m modifying for the new blog.

Speaking of my readers, what are your favorite posts from my blog? I’d love to know so I can make sure they are included in the new launch.

Posted by Saphrym

I know. I know. It’s been a while and it hasn’t been very often. But I’ve been doing a lot of work in the background. Saphrym.com is about to relaunch with a new goal in mind. Look for the new launch in less than 2 weeks. Posts will be updated more often and the categories will make more sense. Oh, if you’re interested in writing for Saphrym.com, make sure to Contact me. I’ll give you more details.

Posted by Saphrym

So, anyone know a good way to prevent DoS attacks? When you’re on a shared server? My site has been down the last week because someone decided to pick on me for some reason and deny my website it’s meager existence. Feel free to discuss it in the forum also. But I could use soem suggestions. I already use Bad Behavior. Super Cache scares me because it constantly messes up WordPress installations. So I just don’t know what to do. I had so many ideas for posts that disappeared because I couldn’t access my site. I’m one of those people that has to write it right then. Never thought to just write it in a text file and copy and paste later. So I guess I learned a few things from this:

1. Write down all ideas for posts somewhere.
2. Write posts in other programs if necessary.
3. Be willing to deal with site downtime because you’ve been targetted for some unknown reason by a DoS aattack from an unknown assailant.
4. Never wear cotton gloves in the rain.

So, any ideas?

Posted by Saphrym

3 Things I’m sorry for¹:

1. I’m sorry I haven’t been around much. And no, I’m not stuck in Fallout 3. On the contrary, I haven’t played it since the post I wrote about it. I’ve been busy with the new job, college, and multiple website and graphic clients I’ve been working with. I just haven’t had enough time to work on the blog. Hopefully that will change soon. And hopefully I’ll get more sleep too.²

2. It seems that when I updated a setting in one of my plugins, it decided to mass mail everyone who has commented on my site. I’m very sorry about that and have removed the offending plugin. For those of you with Word press, the plugin is called Comment Relish. If it’s going to spam people, I’m not going to use it³.

3. I’m also sorry about causing an end to a friendship a couple of years ago. I never meant to hurt anyone.

No, I’m not in a 12 step program or anything. But I needed to apologize to my readers and the third one was for me. I’ll be back tomorrow with more posts that might actually be of interest to you guys.⁴ I’ve collected a few pictures I want to share and I have some good news.

1. There may be others, but I’m too worn out to think of them right now. [«]
2. If I wasn’t male, I’d say I have symptoms of fibromyalgia right about now. [«]
3. I hate spam. So I’m very sorry about this one. I’ll do my best to make sure nothing like that happens again. [«]
4. Might is the operative word of course. [«]

Posted by Saphrym

Ok. I launched the whole Ask Saph thing¹ a while back. You might see the image for it on the right. Well, I’m giving you one other avenue to ask your questions so you don’t have to register for my website². And this is that avenue. This blog post. I’ll link it in the forum post.

It’s simple: Put your question in the comments here.

Remember, the question can be about anything. Anything at all. Just keep it clean. My students visit this site.

Oh, and don’t forget to let me know if you’d like to guest blog here. See this forum post for more details.

(All advice given is for entertainment purposes only. I am not a licensed therapist. But I’ll give you the best advice I can possibly give or point you in the right direction for it.)

1. Thank goodness I haven’t been asked things like how to get rid of acne, because I’d, well, I’ll keep that to myself. [«]
2. As I know people hate registering for accounts since we all probably have 100 profile accounts around the Internet yet use only 1 or 2. [«]

Posted by Saphrym

This is in response to the question asked in my forums by Lady Rose:

If you had one wish from the Genie of Blogs what would it be?

That’s easy. I’d ask for a plasma television. Oh, wait. You said “Genie of Blogs,” huh? Doesn’t matter. The television would be selfish anyway. But a wish for my blog? Hmmm. Let me think.

I could ask for world blogger peace. But if that existed, the bloggers wouldn’t have anything to write about. Hmmm.

I could ask for millions of advertisers to line up in my e-mail all wanting to pay astronomical amounts of money to advertise on my blog. But I’m only one man. Don’t know if I could handle all the e-mails. Might make the wrong person angry. Hmmm.

I could ask to be a better blogger. But that’s subjective. The Genie might give me an extra arm and hand for the mouse. Hmmm.

I could ask for millions of eyes to be on my blog. But that would get yucky. Eyeballs are wet and nasty. Hmmm.

Seriously, I think I’d ask for as many people as possible to read my blog. Why? Well, why not? I’d enjoy the company. I’d also enjoy the feedback. Probably wouldn’t like the death threats and flaming, but I’ve dealt with those before.

What would you ask for?

Posted by Saphrym

This is in response to the question asked in my forums by Monique Renae:

What do you think is the best thing about blogging? What does blogging do for you?

First, let me tell you how I got into blogging: I used to have a “blog” back in 1996. It was on my old website, theebs.com. The Saphrym cartoon character was actually created as “Ely Beasel” and theebs.com stood for “The Ely Beasel Show.” At least, that’s what it meant at the time. It actually first began as “The Electronic Book Store.” But I had an Internet Journal. Didn’t do much with it and later I lost theebs.com. Blogs got popular a couple of years after that. And we all know how popular they are today. Well, about a year ago I decided to install Wordpress for the simple purpose of keeping an online portfolio of my fictional writing and poetry. But then I was diagnosed with diabetes.

So, I decided to use the blog as a way of documenting my weight loss¹. Wasn’t really looking for readers, but then I stumbled on Entrecard. Got some readers from there. People started asking for more information than the boring diet posts². So I started providing more. Blogging became a way of me being held accountable for my diet. It wasn’t just my wife and daughter watching me lose weight. It was now more and more people on the Internet. I didn’t want to let them down. So I lost 70 pounds.

But then I hit a plateau. No more weight loss. Was quite irritating. Lasted for months. Actually only got passed it this past week. However, I needed something to write about. So I started writing about my life, my thoughts, my ideas. The personas I list in the categories of this blog became that much more interesting to me. And people still came to visit even though it wasn’t just about dieting anymore. You guys said you liked my writing. So I have continued.

I’m hooked on blogging. It means I get to write anytime I want and I know at least 10 people will read it other than my family. Sometimes more. Sometimes a lot more. It’s a great feeling to know that people like what you write. And that feeling, along with the support for my continued dieting, is why I will continue to blog for as long as people will read. Even when I’m skin and bones, I’m hoping you guys will enjoy my philosophical points of view and the tiny bit of humor I inject here and there.

1. And I swore I’d never use quick weight loss methods. I wanted to go with natural diets. Although I do use Slim-Fast in my diet. But I want my metabolism to be naturally high. [«]
2. click on that link and you’ll see how boring they were [«]

Posted by Saphrym

Yep. I’m going nuts with posts today¹. Trying to make up for the lack of them in the recent weeks. But now that I’ve said that…

There’s been quite a bit of construction here at Saphrym.com.²

• I’ve installed a few plugins that I’m trying out. Most of it back end stuff. If you’d like to see the ones I have installed, check out my About page.
• I also added a “Blego”³ page to feed my own blogger ego.
• I got rid of the direct link to Twitter and replaced it with FriendFeed. I’m loving that service. Lets me keep track of what my friends like and don’t like and also lets me let people know the same thing.⁴
• I tried Google Ads again for about a day and still can’t stay the way it looks so dropped it.
• Hmmm. What else? Oh yeah, I installed a forum plugin and have my own forums now! The plugin is awesome. It’s called Simple:Press Forum. Check it out if you want your own forums easily integrated into Wordpress. I decided I wanted forums because sometimes there are conversations you want to have with your readers that the comments just don’t work for. And with those forums comes a few other things:
  • I created forums for every topic I discuss on this blog.
  • I’ve opened up registration for blog accounts, and therefore forum accounts, to anyone. Which means I might just finally let a few people guest blog here.
  • I’ve also started asking for advice questions. Check out the Ask Saph topic in the forums.

I think that’s about it other than the stuff you can see in previous posts. So enjoy the new features. I have to go write more posts.

(EDIT: Had to test and see how the blog to forum link worked. Hence the link below this. Probably won’t use it often though. I feel conversations about a specific blog post should probably be done within the comments of that post. And even this “edit” is a test to see if the edit shows up in the forum post. We shall see.)

(EDIT AGAIN: Nope. Doesn’t update the forum post itself when the blog post is edited. Ahh well. Will definitely not use it often. I edit my posts too much.)

1. And plan on writing many more. So I’m increasing the post count on the index page to 10 instead of my normal 5 [«]
2. Not the kind involving replacement of light fixtures, but construction nonetheless. [«]
3. Evil Woobie turned me on to the term. Blame her. Again. [«]
4. Say that ten times fast and I’ll give you a virtual cookie. [«]

Posted by Saphrym

They’re hiding.

Yep. That’s right. They’re hiding. If you use Entrecard, you probably know that credits can’t be sent to an e-mail address. They show up in the form of a code that the person who gets the e-mail can use to put the credits into their own account. What you might not know is that the code can be sent to someone else instead. So, for example, I could easily have sent a code for 2048 credits to my own e-mail address and then hidden that code within one of the posts on my blog.

Ok. So that wasn’t an example. It’s exactly what I did. Somewhere on my blog is the 2048 credit code hidden within one of my 317 posts.

Oh, and here’s the catch: It’s not written in the normal 10 character format. I’ve sounded out the letters and numbers of the code and created words that sound like those letters and numbers. So to find the code, you’ll actually have to read the words. (Example: 12345ABCDE might appear as “Wan tool tree fore fwive ay bea see dea eea.”)

So good luck in finding it. Of course, the first person to find it gets them. I’ll edit this post when that happens. And please, feel free to comment with the correct code (after you’ve used it of course) so it makes it easier for other people to know you’ve found it already. Oh, and to use the code, go to your Entrecard dashboard and click on Apply Coupon. Type it in and submit and you’re 2048 credits richer.

Why 2048? Well, I was looking at some computer memory considering getting 2 more gigs of RAM for my computer. 2048 mb = 2 gigs. The number reminded me of the pricing system at Entrecard. And I realized that almost every popular blog on Entrecard normally costs 2048 to advertise on. So instead of the normal round 1000 or 2000 credits, I decided to make it enough credits to purchase one ad on a popular blog. You get from 200 to 300 clicks when you advertise on one of those blogs. So, to whoever wins, enjoy your free ad!

Oh, and some people might want hints. So here’s a few:

• It’s in one of the other 316 blog posts on my site.
• It’s in a blog post written in the last 5 years.
• A link to the post that it’s on can be found on my new Sitemap linked on the top menu.

Does that help? (Sorry. Couldn’t help it.)

UPDATE July 7th, 2008: Well, Maria got sneaky and found a way to find that last coupon code for the 2048 Entrecard Credits. But that’s ok. I put up another coupon code somewhere on my site. So the contest is still on. Oh, and don’t bother using her method to find it. I temporarily disabled the updating of the XML file.

UPDATE July 8th, 2008: This time Paula found it by doing a spell check on all my posts. You people are too clever for my wallet. Congratulations Paula! But this will be the end of this contest. I’m running out of Entrecard credits.

However, stay tuned. I’m thinking about hiding coupon codes for much smaller amounts in every post I make from this point on. Sound good?

Posted by Saphrym

I’ve yet again been inspired. This time by the Queue Three Networks and their review of my site.

I’ve owned the domain name phantomvoice.net for a long time (over 8 years) and it has been many things for me. But now it’s going to start housing all of my fiction and poetry. I’ve copied all of the fiction and poetry from this site over there. I’m keeping the copies here just for the sake of not having broken links. But form this point on, any poetry or fiction I write will be published over at Phantom Voice.

The reason for this decision was because I really wanted a place that focuses on my poetry and fiction. This blog does not do that. Phantom Voice will. So hopefully you’ll go check it out and read my older writing. I’ll be adding new stuff to it very soon.

Posted by Saphrym