Trying a new WordPress twitter plugin for the blog. Eventually I’m going to figure out how I can make the Twitter API say my blog tweets are from BtDubZ but that’s weeks away. For now, I’m just going to test out TweetSuite. Hopefully I can customize the style of the tweets section in the right sidebar cause Wickett’s Twitter Widget is nice and all but it lacks customization, which is a major con for me. (continue reading…)

I’ve decided to add an avatar. His name’s Ce’Val and he’ll be appearing in the sidebar shortly. Not sure who he’s going to be voiced by. I’m sure I’ll end up doing it for now. Maybe I’ll get Jack or Chris to lend their vocal talents. Might even convince Chris Rosser (@pnut76 on twitter) to voice a few lines. Or I might just get the aforementioned friends and a few others to do it and use all their voices. Separately of course. I’m betting Jack will be the easiest since he’d probably do it if I asked and it won’t be a hassle accessing his voice for lack of a description of circumstances. Hmm. Maybe I’ll ask Luke while I’m over there.
If anybody’s got a good voice (and by that I just mean not annoying to hear) and wouldn’t mind recording a few lines for my avatar, hit me up on twitter.

Crap. I forgot the Twitter feed. I guess I’ll have to make some minor mods to the widget. I don’t know how though. Hello Google!

I redid the background (doubt you’d notice without me telling you what I did). Made a few minor modifications. It’s pretty much done the way I want it. I want the red wisps in the background to run down the page as you scroll down but I don’t think I’m going to implement it anytime soon. It’d require either a really large background (which I don’t want to make because it’d take a long time to download for some) or some CSS work which I don’t feel like doing frankly because I’m not really sure how to do it.

After I post this entry, I’m going to rework the BtDubZ logo. A few minor things about it I’m going to change. Which shouldn’t be noticeable to most.

I keep hearing Dark Child in songs that I listen to and one day I looked it up. I found out that Dark Child’s Rodney Jerkins’ stage name. I’m listening to “You Rock My World” by Michael Jackson as I write this and in this version of the song I thought I heard him say Dark Child in the beginning which is what sparked this post.
So it made me think about artist marks. What do you all think? Is it wrong for him to put it in songs? Is it annoying? As a an “artist” myself, I don’t think so. I think it’s tacky the way Jay-Z and Kayne do it sometimes, especially… nevermind, that’s a whole new story. But whenever I hear Dark Child I usually like the song and if he’d never had it put in songs, I’d have no idea who he was. Props to the man for producing some really good songs.

I’m only posting this to test my latest plugin that’s supposed to tweet whenever I post a new blog entry. It’s called “Tweet This” and hopefully it works better than WP Twitter. I customized the prefix string in WP Twitter and it didn’t work so I’m not using it anymore.

*Update*
So much for “Tweet This”. Had tweet prefix customization but it didn’t actually tweet that way. Using “TweetMyBlog!”. Hmm. Maybe it’ll actually bring me in some money like it claims. Doubt it but why not try?

I’ve had people ask me why both after they found out I tweet and blog. Well it’s simple. A tweet can be about whatever you want and so can a blog post. I analogize tweets to summaries and blogs to essays. If someone does something stupid, I’d tweet about it. If someone does something really stupid that makes me want to talk about it, I’d blog about it.

Today’s the third day I’ve been working on the website’s blog. I finally added twitter to it but I can’t quite get the popup tabs on posts like the Pyrmont v2 has. I need to rewrite the CSS so I can get it formatted to look how I want because as of now it blends into the page. Which is fine except for the fact it doesn’t stand out as something other than a link or boring text in the sidebar. Did manage to get the calendar though. Turns out it’s not a theme specific feature but a widget. Maybe I should just find widgets I want and add them. A lot less coding for me…

Well it’s back to blog design. I gotta rework the background. Not working out as well visually as I’d hoped…

I figured eventually this would happen: ISU Officials ask Anheuser-Busch to discontinue Fan Cans.
I wonder if A-B thought they could really get away with making money off its product which is clearly designed to be associated with the colors of one’s favorite teams. When I first saw them I was wondering if they bore the emblem of the teams they’re colored for and I found out they didn’t. Then I thought of how it’s a brilliant marketing scheme to get sports & beer fans to buy their product and not have to cut the teams in on the deal because they used remarkably similar colors but no emblems. I can agree with the multiple colleges who’ve cried out against it as far as the trademark infringement goes but my concurrence stops there.
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It’s the second day of me working on the blog. I’m not a fan of having to log in to the blog’s admin just to make a post. There’s probably a way I can change that and I’ll look into it later but for now I’m working on the blog’s layout and design. The first theme I tried yesterday was Pyrmont v2 and I liked it. Before work yesterday I changed it to pixel because I liked the thematic elements better (background, footer, etc.). From Pyrmont I like the calendar, the label/tab thingy that shows the date of the post in orange on the top left of the post, and way it lists recent posts better than pixel. I like the aesthetics of pixel, the background, and footer better. I think I’ll eventually combine them both because I like multiple aspects of both themes and together I think it’ll be what I’m looking for.
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I was going to post this on a non admin level but apparently I can’t blog on my blog without logging in as admin. As you can tell if you’re able to read this, BtDubZ is up and running. It was up about a week ago, but I took it down because it didn’t look how I wanted it to and I knew I wouldn’t have the time (or so I thought, turns out work was a bust for the 2 weeks I was supposed to be uber busy) to customize the page’s theme and graphic like I do now.

This marks the first official post for my blog. The first one is automatically created when you “install” your blog, and the second one about Tools was an accident I’ve decided not to delete.