Marcus McCurdy’s Blog

Here is Lola the Chihuahua performing her newest trick.

Everything has been switched over to the new media temple server and is working great. The only hiccup I had was that I needed to change my .htaccess file slightly due to the different server configuration, but everything is copacetic now.

The servers are too slow!

I’ve decided to switch hosting from Go Daddy to Media Temple. Go daddy is just too slow. I’m not sure if it is the database server that is causing my wordpress to be unacceptably slow or if I just got stuck on a bad shared hosting server e.g. someone else is bogging the server down. Hopefully there will be no downtime as I’ve already transfered everything over and the only thing I have to do now is change my DNS information. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

I’ve read many posts complaining about Go Daddy’s support, but I haven’t had to use their support for anything. They are very economical, but when the server is so slow that the page times out when you try to make a post that just isn’t acceptable.

First, I know there are plugins that do this, but I didn’t feel like using a plugin. Second, I got the idea for this from Jennifer Slegg’s blog post 52 easy ways to optimize your blog while on your coffee break. The link that she gave to Matt Cutt’s blog post How to highlight author comments in WordPress didn’t match up with the code my theme is using or the the default Kubrick theme (I think he designed his own theme). I’ll show you the method I used to modify my comments.php and style.css. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Lately, I’ve been looking at noise ninja (a plugin for photoshop that removes digital noise from photographs) because my wife’s camera seems to take very noisy pictures. Then, I came across this cool tutorial that shows how to remove the noise without a plugin. [Read the rest of this entry...]

I love these glowing light trails in photoshop and here is another tutorial on them. The last tutorial I linked to wasn’t really a light trails tutorial, but more of a tutorial on making a background for said light trails. This one looks really cool though so check it out… bah who am I kidding I don’t have any readers so I’ll check it out later.

I found this cool lighting effects tutorial over at Adam Woodhouse’s blog. It is a quick read, but I haven’t used the “render lighting effects” filter in photoshop before and I liked the effect it produced. This would be a good start if you want to make a colorful background and put some of the ever popular light trails in the foreground.

I really don’t know how this obsession got started, but let me begin by explaining it. For some reason I feel this need to bookmark and save all the cool sites on the internet that I find. I use at least 3 different computers during the day and a combination of IE (only when I have no other choice) and Firefox. This would pose a problem if it wasn’t for the wonderful social bookmarking site http://del.icio.us/. I don’t even remember how I found this site, but it is an amazing site. If you don’t know what it is all about well let me explain a little bit. [Read the rest of this entry...]

If you look at the comments section of some of your favorite blogs you will probably see some comments that may look a bit strange upon first glance. I was curious as to what these comments are all about and I found out they are called Trackbacks and Pingbacks. After a little research (and by research I mean a quick Google search) I found a great site that explains both of them and even gives a little tutorial on them. Pingbacks, if enabled, are basically automatic after you change one setting in your blog. Trackbacks require a little more effort, but not much. Check out the whole post at http://www.optiniche.com/blog/117/wordpress-trackback-tutorial/

Tried out the new 2.4 patch for a bit the new area is compltely packed full so expect extreme lag. Mob respawns for most of the quests are decent, but if you do the quest [The Missing Magistrix] and go through the portal you are teleported to the throne of Kil’jaeden and you can’t get back to the [The isle Quel'danas] unless you hearth back to Shatt and take the portal back to silvermoon so be aware of this. Be sure to group up for [Blood for Blood] because the mobs for the quest spawn fairly slowly and are being heavily camped. I also picked up [Savage Plate Chestpiece] from the Sha’tar quartermaster. Now I need to fly around and pick up the rest of the set pieces for my warrior.