Well I'm also setting up to get the OS kernel updated for the webserver. It may occur tonight. I'm making my $40/month work for me and getting the techs to do it. Why else would I pay that much, heh!

I'm running into problems figuring out how to install some caching stuff, and while I was flailing at things I thought "I should upgrade my OS." (In this case from CentOS 4.7 to ... 5.3? or whichever it is) Lo and behold the hostforweb people are willing to do it for me. So I will let them do it. :P Mostly, because I'm lazy. Note: I haven't decided to do it yet, because the techs are informing me it's more complicated than I originally thought. But I am starting to backup to my hard drive right now.

It depresses me a bit that I'm too lazy with OS stuff to even bother. I know I ought to at some point just bite the bullet and reinstall from scratch, and really optimize things, because it's something I *could* do... but I am no linux hobbyist. All I want is for my site to run faster than it is right now, the problem is hindering what I *really* want to be doing. That is, WRITING!

I wonder if this bodes ill for when I am actually going to go back to college. Oh well. I have a headache right now so I'm going to lie down soon. I've been having insomnia problems... again.

This is a small redesign I've been wanting to do for a little while now. Returning to dark background, eliminating a great deal of cluttery links and blocks, and so on. Getting some cache modules installed. I even reduced the number of posts per page (it's actually 5 now instead of 10. That may help, or maybe not.)

For a base, I took an existing Drupal layout (it's called 'decayed' if you're interested) and tweaked a lot of stuff here and there. Jon helped me with all the photoshop manipulation here (including finding some REALLY gorgeous looking flower and butterfly brushes - he says they're free to use, if I knew where they're from I'd credit it ;.;). And I'm reminding myself how much I hate CSS! :D though it isn't quite as bad this time around. Float and clear are my friends.

Not quite done tweaking with all the details yet. I'm going to expand the Announcements section some, for example. Still need to make a final decision on what blocks go where, and how I'll make up for the info that gets cut out.

I'll be working on this more later (and possibly a real post. Maybe?!) but for now it is PSU TIME!

Also messed with a new theme, though I decided not to do it for now. Mostly just need to find one that appeals to me. The one I have now is pretty good, but it gets boring looking at the same thing all the time.

So I just rearranged some front page stuff. Decided to nix the forums and take out the buttons. I'll just bring back the donate button some other time, because it feels pretty lame asking for donations when I don't DO anything for anyone. I may end up wiping out and redoing the gallery at some point, too, and just reuploading all my screenshots.

I did find an awesome static cache for taxonomy_get_vocabularies patch, which I am hoping will really help with loading times given my hugetastic tag list. With that and my changes I'm back down to less than a second on load times (mostly), woo!

At one point I really have to go through the 700+ tags and remove some, but lazy Siren is lazy. :( I swear I'm just not good at anything. Not at writing or coding or anything. Just feel ...useless right now? I don't know. it's depression and my period has been delayed FOREVER, too, so, that doesn't help.

Gah~ I don't usually post so much, but I was looking into this really quick before getting back into my Sims 2 game and I just tested it out.

The current Tagadelic HEAD (revision 1.38, Sep 15, 2007) has a caching scheme that seems to work with my site. It makes use of Drupal's already established cache API, which is even better than anything I would've thought of (I'm not very familiar with drupal's internals). The code can be found through this old Tagadelic feature request -- here's the final patch.

However, it's not yet been committed to the current stable releases. I basically had to roll back any of the other changes made to the stable branch after Sep 15. I suppose I could do the job of porting it myself, but... wait, that means I have to work! Also, I'm shy, and unfamiliar with CVS. ;.;

I'm a bit bummed right now because the Drupal 6 version of the Views module isn't done yet. Apparently the module creator is having trouble porting... a bit of a code-block, if you would. Which is fine but it kinda leaves me unable to do what I wanted with the Anthegenia site until it's done. :(

Maybe I'll give that Panels module a try though... and I may be able to make do with just CCK (content construction kit) with Anthegenia for now. Too bad I suck so hard at making pretty layouts, though :P We've pondered asking Charles to do some graphics for us, but a lot is on the back burner right now anyway until Jon and I get some funding for better instruments, recording equipment etc.

And my life continues to move like molasses... :P