A few days ago, I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. My biggest mistake probably was not checking properly (or even not checking at all) if my homepage was displaying properly. I saw no errors in the back-end so I presumed all was okay.

Today I checked my Google Analytics account and saw that I’ve had 0 visitors for the last two days and only 14 three days ago. Now normally I hover around 40 – 50 visitor / day, so I was a little surprised. I decided to go check my homepage and what do I see? A blank page. Nothingness.

I googled the problem and quickly found a blog post describing the same problems. It only mentioned the Super Cache or wp-cache plugins, but I remembered the PHP Speedy WP plugin also caches everything. Turning this plugin off immediately fixed everything.

I’d like to apologize to anyone who might have come across my white blog the last three days. I promise I’ll check my upgrades better next time.

This website is hosted on a shared server. When I started it was just what I needed: cheap, nothing to worry about etc etc. Though as time progresses and my skills grow, I feel the need for better control. A while back, I had a discussion over at the CodeIgniter forums about hosting etc and a lot of people mentioned VPS hosting. I didn’t know what it was about, but got curious and googled it. What did I learn? I wants.

I started looking for some cheap VPS hosting but my search came up empty, as a student making some money off the side with my webdeveloping, I simply can’t afford 50$ / month.

A while back however I discovered Webbynode. They’re a new company planning to launch an astonishing VPS service in a few weeks. And what’s the good thing? They need BETA testers. A free VPS to beta test it, chances of winning lifetime memberships, iPod’s or 50% off on further deals. I say: don’t hesitate, go sign up! It’s easy, just enter your e-mail address.

For those of you who really don’t have a clue about VPS, some extra info: with a VPS, you basically get a server with a Linux distro for yourself. You can do with it what you want, everything’s possible. This means however that you have to configure everything yourself too. I won’t go into it too much, because there’s simply too much about it, but I know you can “learn” to manage your VPS by playing with a Linux distro in a virtual machine on your computer. Your distro then acts as your VPS. You won’t be able to put your sites live etc, but you’re able to test the whole thing and learn. I’ve only started gathering information myself, but I’m planning to write a few articles about my experiments, so check back later for more info on that!

Don’t worry, I haven’t really. But as you’ll probably notice, there is now some ad-space under the search box. I’m not going to clutter the entire site with ads, do not worry, I’m merely trying to see if I can get any response on this. If I can, I might make a little buck out of selling ads and pay back my hosting costs that way.

To make up for this blight, I will try to write more posts and deliver better content.

If this doesn’t hit off, the ad space will, offcourse, disappear.

However, today I am in that business (at least a bit) and I feel that bramme.net is a little too unprofessional to profile and advertise myself. My clients so far have almost always been Belgian or Dutch and most of them know nothing about the web except that they want a site of their own. However, when they contact me and ask for a portfolio or more information, I have to direct them here, because I have nothing else to show. And that feels kind off awkward. This site isn’t a portfolio, it’s a blog with a portfolio category that stands out a little more. And then some more random stuff.

So I’m thinking of starting up a new portfolio, maybe with a Dutch name and Dutch content to profile myself more around here. And that’s where the thoughts start to go crazy. What about the name? Should I just pick my full name or something fancier? What about the design? I can hardly design, though if I’d like to profile myself as a designer, I’d need one of my own…

Say I do find a suitable domain name and manage to create a good looking template, what about bramme.net? Do I depart from it, giving up the name it’s allready built up and start with something as blog.mydomain.com? Or do I keep it, linking the portfolio to the new site…

As you can see, a lot of questions, a lot of thoughts and no direct answers. That’s why I’m looking for some input from other people. Maybe they have had similar issues in the past, how did they handle it etc.

So if you have anything to say, any comment at all (preferably something useful though), please: do comment!

Please let me know what you think!

However, I do know there are some bugs to be ironed out. Here’s a short list

• Find an image to display categories
• Put the text in the post meta in the middle of the icons
• Fix the sidebar in IE
• Style the comment form to something a tad prettier

If you can help me with any of these, please leave a message!

I’m currently thinking of redesigning the site a little. I’d keep the general look, but add a sidebar. The site’s grown too much I think and it could really use that bar, with categories and all that jazz. What do you think?

I’d also revise the currently used fonts.

However, this evening I figured out something I love AND could write about: movies.

As of now, I will try to update my blog a little more often with movie reviews. I’ve got a very wide taste for movies and I generally like everything between American Pie and Zodiac. So check back now and then (or subscribe to the RSS feed) and I might be able to convince you off watching a movie you otherwise wouldn’t. Hopefully, you’ll then enjoy it. Else, I might feel guilty.

That’s it for now. Over and out.

I’m guessing  I could do it with a custom field, adding other dates, but seeing as I’m waaay to lazy to do that, I won’t.

Also, I don’t know if you guys can see it in any way, but there’s three categories under Portfolio: Digital Art, Photography and Webdevelopment. At the moment I’m only using the last one. The reason I’m not uploading any digital art or photography is because I have a perfectly working deviantArt account and I’m busy making my own CMS, which would be showcased with my photography portfolio.

I’ve been working all day to finish up on my own theme, something I couldn’t have done without the help of Mike from wpcandy.com. I owe him my gratitude!

The next few days, I’ll be putting all the content online and adding stuff to my portfolio, so, check back soon!