I am dropping ads on this blog.  I have been using Google Adwords for a while, but unfortunately Google doesn’t know what to do with my site.  The contextual concept isn’t exactly driving huge click through rates.  In fact in the four months that I have actually written regularly I’ve made a whopping $5. Read more…

I’m happy to announce the launch of Circle Square Technology.  This is my new technology blog.  It’s new so there isn’t a lot of content, but I hope some of my readers will visit and enjoy my take on a variety of technology topics.  I will no longer be writing about technology on this site and will copy the current technology posts over shortly.

If you are wondering about the name, it is a tribute to my family cattle brand.  It is a circle-square and is registered in Montana.

Due to having one to many incidents in the past few weeks of my server being knocked out by my roommates I’m going to be moving connermccall.com to a hosting service.  Hopefully this will go smoothly, but please be patient if you experience any odd behavior.

I’m changing the direction of my blog.  I’m going to move all my tech related content to a new site where I plan to write more.  This new blog is currently in development and should go live sometime late October to mid November.  Second I’m going to publish here a lot less.  I currently publish about once every 2-3 days.  Fortunatly, I have come to the realization that my writing skills are extremely rusty.  I plan on writing less but also writing longer more thoroughly researched and thought out posts.  I hope to publish once every 7-10 days for now and increase frequency as I regain my writing skills.  I hope that those that frequent my blog will stick with me through this transition.  If you can stand my writing now, it should only improve.

If you visit this site you have probably noticed a fairly major redesign.  I spent a month working on this design and I hope you like it.  I have tested it fairly extensivly in Firefox and Chrome.  I know there are a few oddities in IE6 and hope to get those ironed out in the next few weeks.

A few other things I want to mention.  The categories and pages menu are now drop down menus on the top menu bar.  Ads have been removed for now.  Also you will see a new item in the sidebar called ‘My Web Activity,” this is a widget that gets it information from Profilactic.com.  This is a great site that aggregates activity from all over the web.  I have also added the ability to subscribe to my posts via email.  You can input your email address in the sidebar and be updated whenever I post.  (Edit:  This plugin appears to be broken, if you wish to get added to the mailing list please send an email to posts@connermccall.com. Sorry for the inconvenience.)

One other item of note, my comment line now states that it wants you to join others that have been wrong.  This doesn’t mean I think you are all wrong, instead it’s a homage to one of my favorite xkcd comics.  I appreciate all of my readers and hope that no one is offended.  If you are, well please refer to the comment line on on my posts ;).

The site is XHTML 1.0 valid except for a few random bits of widget code.  The framework is based on YUI which is Yahoo!’s user interface library.  Nothing else too exciting to see here, I’ll probably be making a few minor adjustments as things proceed, but please drop a note in the comments if anything is too out of wack.

I wanted to give a quick update on my new site redesign.  It has been a long process, but I finally have something I’m happy with.  I currently only have the initial design done, There is still a bit of work to do styling the individual posts and sidebar items.  Then I need to develop the comment and 404 pages.  Happily things should move quickly now that I have a primary design done.  Here is a screenshot for your viewing pleasure. 

Starting today I will be on vacation until the 20th.  I’m traveling to Montana to visit my family, and if I post at all it will be very limited.  I don’t have any big plans for the week, but we will be visiting Virginia City and hiking around Bozeman.  My camera is coming with me so look forward to some pictures from the one of the most scenic places in the U.S.

I’m turning off comment moderation so any comments made will show up right away.  Unfortunatly this may mean a few pieces of spam get through my filters.  Please don’t panic, I’ll clean things up when I get back.  Everyone have a wonderful week and I look forward to boring you all to tears with my writing when I return.

I’ve made some changes to the backend server running the site.  There should be a bit of an increase in performance.  Everything appears to be working from my end, but if you encounter any problems, please let me know either in the comments or emailing me at conner at connermccall.com.

Just want to say thank you to Mr. Phil Price, for providing the current image.  The image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.