Some people might have noticed some downtime on my blog, this in combination with just being added to the blog pack isn’t exactly ideal, but the issue has been solved, there were a few issues with the nameservers that have been permanently fixed by Lonetrek.

Besides this I’m not feeling really well at the moment, I feel a little sick and exhausted but I hope it won’t develop itself into the flu or something. I’ll also be actively blogging soon again as I have some material I want to write down.

~Xeross

As most of you have already heard (And as some of you have already blogged about it) David Perry (A.K.A. CrazyKinux) has posted the new Blog Pack member list on his blog. Almost immediately as I got word the new list was up I went to check it out (As I was secretly dreaming of  a place in the pack myself).

So after opening the post and scrolling through the list of  people that made it into the new pack I felt a sudden burst joy and amazement as I was on the list. I didn’t expect it as I didn’t think my posts were of that great quality, but it seems CK finds them valuable so I’m now a proud member of the pack.

So here once more is the list of people that made it into the new blog pack, congratulations to both old and new members alike.

1. A Ghost Blog, by Mr NOXx
2. A Merry Life and a Short One, by Hallan Turrek
3. A Mule in EVE, by Manasi
4. Astral’s EVE Trial by Fire, by Astral Dominix <– NEW
5. Beginnings of Piracy (The), by Mail Lite <– NEW
6. Captain’s Log (The), by Prometheus09
7. Chocolate Heaven, by Kala <– NEW
8. DeafPlasma’s EVE Musings, by DeafPlasma
9. Dense Veldspar, by Ahnog <– NEW
10. Diary of a Bored Spaceman, by Rolinthor <– NEW
11. Diary of a Pod Pilot, by Myrhial Arkenath
12. Ecliptic Rift, by Casiella Truza
13. Elitist (The), by Xeross <– NEW
14. EVE Monkey, by evemonkey <– NEW
15. EVE Newb, by Spectre
16. EVE Online Wormholes, by Star Defender
17. EVE Travel, by WebSapceships <– NEW
18. EVE’s Weekend Warrior, Tony
19. EVEOGANDA, by RixxJavix <– NEW
20. Finders and Keepers, by Aiden <– NEW
21. Flashfresh – A Pirate, by Flashfresh
22. Freebooted, by Seismic Stan <– NEW
23. Guns Ablaze, by Jager Da <– NEW
24. Hands Off, My Loots!, by Cyberin
25. Helicity Boson, by Helicity Boson <– NEW
26. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, by Kirith Kodachi
27. Jump on Contact, by Zetetic <– NEW
28. Jumping through Wormholes, by eve_riotrick <– NEW
29. K162space, by Blake
30. Kane Rizzel – A Pirate’s Perspective, by Kane Rizzel
31. Kirith Darkblade, by Kirith Darkblade <– NEW
32. Learning to Fly, by Arukemos <– NEW
33. Letrange EvE’s Blog, by Letrange <– Forced out of retirement
34. Life in Low Sec, by Mynxee
35. Mike Azariah, by Mike Azariah <– NEW
36. Morphisat’s Blog, by Morphisat
37. My Loot, Your Tears, by Khalia Nestune <– NEW
38. Nashh Kadavr’s EVE Blog, by Nashh Kadavr <– Pulled out of a black hole just in time!
39. Our EvE, by Kename Fin <– NEW
40. Planet Risk Show (The), by Luminus Aardokay & Quivering Palm
41. Postings from the Edge, by Zapatero
42. Rettic’s Log: The Chronofile, by Rettic
43. Rifter Drifter, by Wensley
44. Roc’s Rambling, by Roc Wieler
45. Sweet Little Bad Girl, by Shae Tiann
46. Tales of Clan Oriana (The), by @Clanoriana <– NEW
47. To Boldly Go, by Katia Sae <– NEW
48. Venoms Bite, by Venom <– NEW
49. Wench with a Wrench, by Maeve <– NEW
50. Yarrbear Tales, by 00sage00
51. CrazyKinux’s Musing, by myself!!!

Edit (03-03-2010): Updated, added links to all blogs.

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.

Lately I’ve started focusing more on post quality, so I’ve started looking for interesting and useful resources to aid me in the process, and as I’m currently doing Day 2 of ProBlogger’s “31 Days to Building a Better Blog (The E-Book)” (Which is writing a list post) I decided to share the things I’ve found.

ProBlogger

ProBlogger has a lot of information on how to improve your blog, even though it’s mostly focused on making money with your blog the information is valuable for any type of blog. I can highly recommend following “31 Days to Building a Better Blog” which is a free 31 day program. And I also recommend scrolling down on that page because there’s a few hundred links listed for every part of the program of which most also contain interesting and useful information.

I’m currently following the improved E-Book version of the program which can be found here.

Copyblogger

This website has been recommended to me by Mynxee it also contains a huge amount of information from writing to SEO to blog themes.

Guide to Love for the Lonely Blog

A post written by Mynxee containing some tips specifically for EVE blogs, however you can apply the tips on any other kind of blog too.

BlackHatWorld

BlackHatWorld is a forum that primarily focuses on making money on the internet, however the Blogging and Whitehat SEO sections contain a lot of useful information for almost any blogger, and the forum also has lots of other information that might be useful to you.

Using the forum is completely free, however they have some things you can pay for but they don’t really have a benefit for us bloggers.

How to Be Your Own Best Editor

How to be Your Own Best Editor is a book written by Barry Tarshis, Mynxee has recommended it to me and so has Venom Orchid. According to them and to reviews he writes in an engaging manner and also adds in some humor.

Even though this book is about editing and not about blogging, I’ve put it in here too because it’s an important part of it. I don’t have a copy yet so I can’t tell you if it’s good myself, but I’ll have one soon and I’ll probably review it once I finished reading it.

Wrapping up

Well that wraps it up for my list of useful blogging resources, I hope you will find this post useful and that it will help your blog a lot.

If you have any more valuable resources please leave a comment and I’ll add them to the post.

I’d like to thank Mynxee for providing me with a link to Copyblogger, writing the “Guide to Love for the Lonely Blog” and both Mynxee and Venom Orchid for recommending me “How to Be Your Own Best Editor”.

I was talking to an old corp mate of mine a few days ago and I was looking for a new corp and they had room. So I tried to apply but I got the message that I couldn’t apply because the CEO doesn’t have the Ethnic Relations skill. I asked my friend if the CEO could train it, and tonight I asked if the CEO trained it already.

Xeross155 > But does CG have Ethnic shizzle now so I can apply ?
Rammit > we will all watch ethnic jokes we talked about it last night
Xeross155 > I’m talking bout the character skill -_-
Rammit > oh
Rammit > wow I feel stupid
Xeross155 > You seriously discussed ethnic jokes with the corp o.O
Rammit > yes

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.

Well I had to create a post with my claim token so…

ZX95536GP2YC

This script will fix the dropdown text color in OGame, I made it for Firefox (Only tested with 3.6) it makes the select tags inherit the text color so the text inside em is readable.

Download

Over at userscripts.org

Changelog

1.1 – 25/Jan/2010

Removed jQuery loading because OGame already includes it, fixes galaxy overview

1.0 – 22/Jan/2010

Initial Release

Code

// ==UserScript==
// @name           OGame (1.X) Dropdown Text Color Fix
// @namespace      http://theelitist.net/2010/01/22/ogame-select-tag-fix/
// @description    Fixes OGame (1.X) Dropdown Text Color
// @include        *.ogame.org*
// @exclude        *board.ogame.org*
// ==/UserScript==

// Modify the CSS
$(document).ready(function() {
	$("select").css("color", "inherit");
});

Post any bugs/suggestions here in the comments or at userscripts.org

~Xeross

Well it’s been a while since I posted a log on here so it’s time for another one, it’s been a busy week both at home and at school.

First of all I got my internship, I had an employment interview at a school this morning, and after talking a bit about my experience in the IT, a run through of my tasks and a sort of tour around the building I was accepted. I’ll start my internship at Friday 5th of February, I would’ve started at the 4th but due to circumstances there wasn’t any time for my “mentor” to get me going on Thursday.

Other then this next week we have the terms exams again so I’m preparing for them a little, luckily this time they’re all on one day instead of spread throughout the week (They take 5-20 minutes each and there’s 3 of  ‘em).

And lastly I’ve been dispatching the new navigation system to all websites that use my CMS. and I’ve been training Adv. Weapon Upgrades in EVE to IV (Maybe V) so now I can fit additional modules because of the powergrid savings.

Well that’s it for this log, stay tuned for the next one (or next post).

~Xeross

This morning I arrived at school, got my stuff and went to the classroom only to find out I was an hour early, fortunately this gave me some time to talk with the internship coördinator however he wasn’t present. They said he’d arrive at 8:30 but he still wasn’t present at 8:45 so I decided to go to the OLC (Open Learning Center, Huge room with lotsa computers) and catch up on some school work.

At 9:25 I shut down my USB Ubuntu and head to the classroom. After figuring out questions we had to answer through brainstorming around a central subject we went to the OLC again to find stuff about the subject. In this case development in hardware (CPU, graphics cards, storage devicers, etc.).

For CPUs and graphics cards it’s just a bigger, better, faster, stronger kind of thing and that’s about it and with storage devices we have SSDs. After finding the required information I had to resize my casper-rw file (This is where USB Ubuntu stores all changes) because it was full, this took 15 minutes and after that I could boot back into Ubuntu.

Once it was done booting I started looking on the internet how I could run my password manager from within linux (It’s a .NET Framework executable). Fortunately there’s Mono which allows you to run .NET applications on linux, after installing the packages I tried executing the password manager and it worked, so another step into switching to linux.

After this I decided to go look for some oldschool games (Dracula: Reign of Terror, Knights and Merchants, etc.) that would run on the school computers. I installed both of these games through Wine and tried playing them. Dracula works pretty well however Knights and Merchants is being buggy (However that’s probably fixable). Hereafter we went back to class to “Report our findings” and after this I had some more time to toy around with Linux before we had to discuss our portfolio and internship efforts with our mentor.

Then I took the bus home and found a reply from the internship coordinator that he reviewed my qpplication letter and résumé and that he made a few modifications. After this I sent them to the Elementary School that I’m applying to, and I already have a reply for an application meeting/conversation, however the date might need to be changed.

Other then that I gathered all my stuff from all around New Eden and hauled it to my main base of operation, also tweaked some of my market order prices and well that’s about it.

~Xeross