The blog had some downtime a while ago, we’re still not sure what the cause was but all we know is the entire server was down.
Currently everything is working again, now we’ll just have to hope 2host doesn’t somehow fail again.
So I now have this blog and my other blog at blog.xeross.nl, however the xeross.nl one is still really basic and needs work.
Though if I just move everything over to this blog I will have an established base and audience.
I was planning on making blog.xeross.nl more of a personal life kinda blog, and this a gaming blog, but keeping it at 1 blog is probably easier.
So what do you think? Leave a comment 
What started out as an experiment with GIT and Python ended up being something I’ll probably keep.
The beauty of this new blog is that it’s really easy for me to write new posts, as with WordPress I need to login, hit Add New, fill in all the fields and hit publish. However with the new one I can just type in:
python ../post.py Some Title Here
It will chuck out a template with the title and date filled in, and open it in vim (Or any other editor, can be modified), after that I just write down what I want, save the file and exit the editor, and it will automatically be uploaded to the blog.
This is all done through the GIT Source Code Management system, although it is now more of a Content Management System in this case, it will save the posts in a specified location in the repository and as soon as it hits the server a python script will run that will chuck out static html with all the posts and css and w/e.
I’ll probably post more on http://blog.xeross.nl/ (Has been taken offline) and keep this more EVE focused.
Regards, Xeros
As most of you probably noticed the blog was down a every now and then the last few days. This is because we moved the blog once more.
I just didn’t like the restricted environment of a shared hosting account with CPanel, so I have switched the blog over to a Cloud VPS on the Rackspace Cloud
Now after setting up the blog on this new server we encountered a problem, We were going into deep swap usage on the server, meaning it would basically lockp-up entirely.
So after discovering this I went to research on how to resolve this and eventually made the switch from Apache with PHP as a module to nginx with PHP-FPM.
It still requires some tweaking but behaves a lot better compared to apache, especially now PHP isn’t loaded to handle static files.
I’ve also uploaded a shiny clean install of wordpress, meaning all wordpress files are in their original form and all plugins have been reinstalled and reactivated.
All that remains now is to get IntenseDebate to behave itself again, now waiting for it to import the comments.
Well that’s it for today, onto another long period of uninterrupted blog uptime galore.
~Xeross
After reading this post by Myrhial Arkenath I decided to overhaul some aspects of my blog too, adding some plugins and changing some settings.
As you might have noticed I have changed my permalink structure, up till about 10 minutes ago the structure would’ve been /year/month/day/post-name however the date part is completely unneeded and just makes the URL longer. So now I’ve changed the structure to be /post-name as can be seen in your url bar right now (probably).
Next to this I’ve also added some additional plugins, for info on what they do again check Myrhial’s post
Breadcrumbs aren’t yet implemented in the blog theme but will be added soon.
~Xeross
Yep that’s right, the blog has been moved once more, we already had the blog situated at Lonetrek Hosting for a while now but after having a thorough chat about it with Anthony (The owner and founder of Lonetrek Hosting) I decided to upgrade to the Grid Power package in combination with the 75% ISK discount.
This brought my hosting costs/year down by over 80% compared to HostGator, with Lonetrek I pay 30$ a year (+ 250m ISK for the discount) and with HostGator I had to pay over 120$ a year. So now the blog has moved over the shared subdomain has moved over and I’ll be moving over all my other websites too.
So mad props to Anthony for providing great and personalized support and I recommend everyone that’s thinking about self-hosting their blog or hosting a website or something to go for Lonetrek Hosting.
I have once more remodified the theme, it was a fair bit of work but I’m satisfied with the result, a gaming blog just looks a lot better with a dark theme in my opinion.
I’ve also modified all images currently used in posts to be either PNG or GIF so that they can be properly viewable on both light and dark skins.
I’ll be adding a style switcher too, this will make the old style be just a mouse click away. Please tell me what you think of the new theme and if you have any suggestions don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Thank you.
I’ve decided to change my nickname here on my blog and on other places (Twitter, Etc.) back to Xeross, I’ve been using Xeross for a lot longer and it just fits better, the blog’s name won’t change and other then my nickname nothing will change.
~Xeross
I had already in my mind that my current sidebar was way too big, a widget for pages, one for recent posts. I however never spent any time on it. Until I thought I need a new header.
So I started designing the new header with the idea of getting a new modern looking title, and implementing a recent posts list into it and my “Useful EVE Links” page. So I spent a while designing it and after a while I was satisfied with the result and started implementing it. And well you can see the result, the only things I didn’t manage to implement are a scrolling recent posts listing and also making that same listing have a fade-in and fade-out effect on the top and bottom of it.
Well I did manage to implement a scrolling recent posts listing but it used a lot of CPU power to move everything around (On my CPU it hit 50%) and that’s just not what I want (and probably als something you, my readers don’t want.). I’ll try to create it using flash in the future, but for now this is sufficient.
I’ve also added a new background containing what I think is a ship, and I’ve added the Minmatar logo and some starry background to the bottom of posts (The starry background is faded out a lot so it might be a little hard to see), I’ve also added a sort of logo to all blockquotes which you can see on for example my 13th Blog Banter post (the grey boxes).
With the Recent Posts and EVE Links pages implemented into the header I could remove the recent posts and pages widget from the sidebar, making it less tall and making room for future additions. One of these additions will be an about page because that’s one of the things most bloggers have but what my blog is lacking.
I hope some of you can take the time to comment on these new changes and tell me what you think about them, your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Recently (29 October 2009) Twitter implemented a new feature called “Twitter Lists”, this feature allows to create lists containing people that for example play the same game. Once created one could click on such a list and see the tweets of only the people in that group, so it’s ideal if you want to track groups of people separately.
After this change I already saw a few EVE Online lists pop-up, but these lists only had the people the creators had in their following list. So I decided I’d also create one of these groups and add every EVE Twitter user I could find (Well maybe not every but a lot of ‘em).
At the moment the list contains 146 people and I will add any EVE related folks I can find to it. if you want to be added just post a comment on this post or contact me on twitter. And ofcourse the last thing in this post, the list: @Xeross/eveonline
Hey Folks,
The last few days I’ve been busy rebuilding our current theme. In Internet Explorer it had some font size issues which caused the navigation to look weird and some other little bugs. so I decided to recode the entire theme myself to get rid of these errors. Font size issues are completely fixed, there are still some bugs in the theme here and there but I’m working on ironing those out at the moment.
And as you can also see we’ve changed the logo, I’ve created this new logo a few weeks ago but decided that I would release it together with the theme rebuild.
Tell me what you think about the changes and the new logo.
Regards, Xeross
