Time Immortal

Blazing Cat Fur writes:

I do enjoy your blog and your subtle sense of sarcasm;)

That’s the sort of endorsement that makes a guy like me blush. And actually, I’d like to answer and endorsement with an endorsement; Blazing Cat Fur is a great blog to read, I find. Genuinely unapologetic conservatives are not the most common breed. And don’t miss the profile cartoon for the blog — man, I think my friend Paul used that as his MSN name for a month!

Some history:

Time Immortal went live on May 19th of 2004, and was built (at the time) with Macromedia Dreamweaver, using CuteNews for database-free content management.

By August of that year, I’d overhauled the look of the page to be free of frames, but I was still using CuteNews and Dreamweaver. The site languished for a while at that point, before being resurrected on Marth 13th of 2005, this time using the Mambo PHP/MySQL-driven content management system.

And then the site languished again. For a time, the blog was moved over to a subdomain, kennethk.timeimmortal.net. This subdomain actually went live in 2004 at some point (probably July or August), but once it was converted to Mambo (on November 11th of 2004), it became my primary blog.

That lasted until February 7th of 2006, at which point I moved blogging back to the main Time Immortal domain. I was still using Mambo at this point. In the time that had transpired between starting and ending the “kennethk” subdomain, I’d coined the term “backdoor sharia“, participated in the Omar Alghabra blogburst (mistakenly, as it turned out), and made Lost Budgie spew coffee all over his keyboard by remarking that, failing the success of trying to “follow the money”, one should “follow the genitalia” — that was in an article on Islamic suicide bombers wrapping their…uhm…”little jihadists” in aluminum foil prior to self-detonating.

Oh, Lost Budgie…where have you gone?

Anyhow, it wasn’t until January of 2007 that Time Immortal switched over to using the Wordpress content management system, and it will remain with that system for the time being. I keep getting tempted to return to the heady days of Mambo, but I just don’t like how the templates for that system cannot be edited online, in a compartmentalized fashion.

I don’t really know why I just went in to all that detail, but for whatever reason…there it is. I’ve been blogging, in some way or another, for almost four years now, and it’s amazing how much the world has changed even in that short span of time (not always for the better). Four years ago, I’d never even heard of Richard Dawkins — now, I lampoon the man regularly, and many of his contemporaries likewise. The Twin Towers had come down, but the Muhammad cartoons hadn’t yet been published. And I had no idea that human rights commissions were as much of a threat as they were. Oh, and I was still in university.

Still, if those were happier times, these are better times, and I’ve no complaints. The blog continues to grow, and is picking up traffic little by little, which I like. And in the meantime, if a few cool cats like BCF give it a read once in a while, I can say my day is made.

Or at least that my day would be made, except for the fact that my wife already makes my day just by virtue of being next to me when I wake up in the morning.

Time Immortal had its 400,000th visit over the weekend.

That’s not a total for the site for only as long as it’s had Wordpress installed, but a cumulative total that I’ve been carrying over to each successive blog iteration since I first began recording visit counts on the site here, back in the days when I was still using Mambo. These days, I’m lucky to hit fifty visits in a day, but in the past there were some truly heady times indeed.

That’s okay, though — one gets to like the peace and quiet after a while.

You may have noticed that I’ve been something of an absentee over the past week and change. There are two reasons for that. The first (and not nearly as good) reason is that I’ve been busy with other stuff, most notably school. And indeed, that thing called “life” has in general kept me on my toes for much of the week. If you’re at all curious about what I’ve been up to, you can check out some of the recent activity at these other sites I run:

• Lost Sosaria, where I’ve been busily adding new “stuff” to the Neverwinter Nights module I’ve been building for the past couple years now.
• My CMPUT 299 project, the Neverwinter Nights module that I have to build for my game design class
• The CHRTC 451 forum, which I built for another of my classes, this one a theology lecture on modern creationisms.

The other reason I’ve been kind of absent, besides being busy with those things above and with other things besides, is that I’ve been preparing a new website for launch!. That’s the site you’re looking at now, the product of a few months of design, testing, and CSS refinement. But I think, at last, that I’ve got it where I want it, and so here it is, brand new and ready to rock.

So anyhow, you might be wondering why I went to the new site. There are a few reasons, not the least of which is that I thought it was time for a change. However, there were a few other considerations, some worth mention:

• The move to the new site let me switch away from Mambo 4.5.0 and upgrade to Mambo 4.5.1. I realize that may not seem like a large version number increase, but believe me — it is. Mambo 4.5.1 offers me a larger degree of control over the site’s content and its display than 4.5.0 did, and it features more dynamic templates as well. Plus that, there are a few site components for 4.5.1 that weren’t available for 4.5.0. Chief among these are the Tip Jar and the Verse of the Day visible on the right sidebar.

  Please feel free to make use of the Tip Jar, especially! I can always use the help!

• The opportunity to use a fixed-width, visually dazzling template was too good to pass up.
• The Chesterton Quote Machine was something I was able to re-adapt as an actual site module instead of simply inserting the extra PHP code into the sidebar in the actual page layout. That means I can move it around the site if I feel like it…and given that some of the random quotes are quite LONG, that may eventually happen.
• The main domain page, www.timeimmortal.net, has sat empty for too long now, or rather has been un-used for too long. I’ve developed it out somewhat in the past, but in practice it’s only ever been an RSS aggregator for other Time Immortal sites that I post to. And I’m going to re-implement that feature shortly, because that’s sort of an end goal of what the site is for as well — it will be my blog, and also where you can come for news snippets from other projects I work on.

  But for the moment, it was just important that I get the main site back in use.

And so the old site is officially “closed”, and will be maintained only for posterity. In the next week or so, I’ll be sending out emails to all the folks who link to me asking them to update their links (as it were), but in the meantime welcome to the new site, and I hope you enjoy it!

The new site has been published and launched, again using the versatile Mambo Content Management/Portal System. Most of the content from the original site has been ported over, and the remainder is coming shortly. In the meantime, have a look around and make good use of the Contact Me feature to give your feedback!