Seth Warren

So I was thinking, "hmm, my website could use a fresh coat of virtual paint, so to speak." Thus, I opened up files on my hard drive and started tweaking things. This lead to me thinking, "well, if I change this, I may as well change this as well, and if I change that..." and so it went.

So, maybe in a couple of weeks I'll upload a website with a "fresh coat of virtual paint." Or I'll become so annoyed and frustrated that I'll leave the damn thing just as it is.

Since the fixes for the errors were becoming increasingly convoluted, I just said, "fuck it," uninstalled the board, reinstalled, patched and went through the process of setting everything up again. Unfortunately, any registrations and posts that were there are gone now, so if you were registered, your profile no longer exists and you'll have to re-register.

I suppose I should consider it a small blessing that I didn't have to burn and rebuild an established board with hundreds of members and thousands of threads. Hopefully that will never happen and this new installation is far more stable than the old.

Feel free to play guinea pig.

Remember yesterday that I was ranting about not finding the stupidly simple thing that was keeping my web forum from rendering and running properly? Well, I have a correction: it was a stupidly simple thing that was keeping me from seeing it rendering and running properly. For some reason the URL bbs.illusionofjoy.net prevents the board software from recognising image pathways and certain CSS elements (when, by all logical accounts this shouldn't be happening). However, illusionofjoy.net/bbs functions perfectly. Go figure.

At least the damn thing finally works and I have it looking how I want it to. Go register, play around, revel in the fact that there hasn't been a flame war yet (or more than four posts).

Among the many toys included with my webhosting package was the option of installing either a phpBB or SMF web board for my website (if I was really bored and masochistic, I could opt to install both). I opted for phpBB for the simple fact that it took up less disc space and there seemed to be more online documentation for it. So, now illusionofjoy.net has a web forum. It's pretty bare-bones at the moment and certainly not ready for prime time, but if anyone wants to register and play around on it, I'm letting you know it exists.

Also, I apologise in advance if any tinkering I do with the settings causes any posts you might make to be lost. But I doubt that will happen. Just saying that could...

If anything, you might log on to find the colours have gone funky. It seems the CSS file for the thing is quite lengthy and a bit convoluted, so getting the colour scheme to match the rest of my site will be a task.