Friends, I’ve some bad news. This web site is broken.

To the casual eye everything seems hunky-dory, I know. But deep within the bowels of MySQL-this and PHP-that, something has gone fatally awry. If you’re interested you can read my cry for help here—suffice to say, I’ve better things to do than troubleshoot lines of code!

A previous entry on the subject of free web stuff has got me thinking about moving my blog over to a free blog hosting site. There are lots of them out there, but hopefully you’ll agree that the two current heavyweights are Blogger and WordPress.

Blogger was the engine that brought blogging to the masses. Now that it’s been gobbled up by Google the new owners are working on a bunch of new features, like categories and posting via text message—features that I’ve had around here for quite some time.

This is what my site would look like on Blogger. You’ll notice that I was successfully able to integrate my badges from del.icio.us and Flickr, but I’m not wild about the template, and in my mind it’s the nicest one they’ve got.

WordPress.com is a free, hosted install of the very popular open-source engine available at WordPress.org. You can’t install the myriad of plug-ins or themes on the dot-com version, but you don’t risk wrecking your blog by doing so, either.

This is what my site will look like on WordPress.com—I say will because I’m a sucker for a good design, and WordPress’s implementation of my sidebar stuff is in my opinion much easier on the eyes. WordPress also gives me the option of a static start page, where I would put links to all my breadcrumbs spread so far and wide across the internet.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with all the stuff I’ve got here…

In days of old I would painstakingly tweak my travel photos in Adobe Photoshop and upload each and every one of them with a thorough description and appropriate links. I wouldn’t even have considered uploading videos, as the large file sizes would eat up my available server storage faster than you could watch them.

But this past weekend I placed my precious travel souvenirs in the very capable hands of Flickr and YouTube, both free services and current darlings of the social media set. It was such a painless experience that I’m starting to rethink this whole blog re-design thing.

Considering that this very page has permanent links to both my Flickr and del.icio.us accounts, and that I’ve also had a free Blogger account since 2003, maybe I can nix my monthly web server bill by having AC.ca re-direct to a start page that will list all these other accounts as links.

I’ll try to mock one up this week to show you what I mean…

All you wannabe web designers out there take note: I’ve switched templates on the next version of this site to accommodate left-handed navigation.

An Amber MacArthur segment on a recent Call for Help pointed me to this study of how a typical set of eyeballs scans a web page. The verdict seems to be that for Roman-based language sites all readers start scanning from the top-left corner of any page. Also of interest is that ads—even on Google search pages like the one above—are largely ignored… Who knew?!

In my search for a suitable template set I was momentarily seduced by the tropical colour palette of this theme, but ultimately settled for something a little more austere, as it can more easily be converted for mobile phone viewing.

I’ve still got some major tweaking to do, so keep checking in on my beta page and let me know what you think!

That’s the verdict from the design mavens at Six Apart, and they’re talking about “Kubrick”, the template I’ve been using on this site since migrating from Movable Type in late 2004.

The logical move would be to K2, also designed by Michael Heilemann. It’s navigational slider is either a triumph of usability or needless gimmick, depending on how you look at it. Regardless, you won’t be seeing it around here anytime soon since it hasn’t been ported to my publishing system yet.

Of the available template choices I’ve found this and that, but neither of the two seem conducive to putting my peepers up at the top of the page. So for now I’m using this as a starting point, and will tweak the colours and fonts to make it look a little less, you know… Femmy.

It likely won’t go live for at least a couple of weeks, but if you want to track my progress you can check out my beta page, here. Feel free to leave me some feedback if you like!

Click on the image above or right here to see my latest guerilla video for iLaugh, shot with Al Howell over the long weekend at Queen’s Park in downtown Toronto.

If it gives you a larf please do your part by rating, sharing and cross-posting it!

I can’t believe I didn’t find this earlier… A recent article on The Boston Globe website proposes that blogs are essential to a good career. Not only do I wholeheartedly agree with the points they make, but I’ve got my own experience to add to each of them:

1. Blogging creates a network. Absolutely. A one-off post I made about the seal hunt last year has given birth to a spirited debate on the subject from all sides, free for you to read or contribute to.
2. Blogging can get you a job. And it did.
3. Blogging is great training. True enough. I knew diddly-squat about CSS before I switched to a CMS. I’m still no expert, of course… But at least now I know the difference between the two.
4. Blogging helps you move up quickly. And it helps you maintain your expert status as well. With all the other work I’m getting I can no longer call myself a full-time professional actor. But check the comments on my showbiz-related posts and you’ll see lots of lively discussion there. In other words: entertainment-types are still interested in what I have to say!
5. Blogging makes self-employment easier. Oh yes… Instead of carrying business cards with me, I now flippantly tell prospective employers to Google me. I love that!
6. Blogging provides more opportunities. My career has certainly diversified since I started this site.
7. Blogging could be your big break. Who knows who’s reading this right now?
8. Blogging makes the world a better place. Couldn’t agree more. Why read what some overpaid journalist dumbs down for you? Passion, not profit, makes for more compelling writing. ‘Nuff said.

So there you have it. If you don’t already have a blog of your own you may well be committing career suicide!

If you read between the lines in today’s iLaugh.com entry you may well surmise that, for the next little while at least, I’ll no longer be posting there on a daily basis. This is because the higher-ups are getting worried that the blog part of the site is growing exponentially at the expense of the multimedia content that’s slower in coming.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that I now have the luxury to take my sweet time with more polished, less time-critical material. Or in other words, I’m getting the same pay for ostensibly less work.

And here’s the great news: My boss has asked me to submit a reel and ideas for scripts.

I love this job!

What a pleasant surprise it was to wake up from my afternoon nap to news that the site that I’ve been posting to for almost two weeks is live! You may now view my professional bloggage daily at (drum roll, please)…

http://ilaugh.com/laughjournal/

My posts are the ones published under the pseudonym “iLaugh Staff”, which we can keep as our little secret. The current schedule has me posting by around 9:30am each and every morning for the next six months—or until I get fired—after which I will tend to my first love, right here…

It seems that my last post about the beginning of the end for the Mac OS struck a definite chord with Apple fanatics. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: I had some help in getting word out…

The Slashdot effect, also known as being Slashdotted or Dugg, refers simply to a smaller website like mine being linked to by a much bigger one. The huge surge in hits can put a strain on the servers hosting the smaller site, and in some cases can actually bring it down!

Thankfully that didn’t happen here, but after posting my Mac doomsday scenario yesterday I decided on a whim to cut and paste a link with text into an email and send it to the weekday editor at MacSurfer, a popular portal for Mac-related news. And lo and behold a half-hour later I was listed and the comments started flooding in.

Along with the feedback there’s also been a healthy does of comment spam. My personal favourite so far has been from Frank McDermott, whose entire comment was this:

“Have you seen Chicken Little?”

(Yours truly at Darryl’s Hard Liquor & Porn Film Fest last year. Photo courtesy of Amanda Shear…)

My nerd school professors would be so proud…!

Starting at the end of this month, I’ll be able to add the title “paid blogger” to my résumé, not because I’m putting advertising on this site, but because someone’s actually going to start paying me for what I do most mornings anyway—that is, trawl the web for news then post my own smart-ass take on it.

I have to consult my future boss before linking to the site I’ll be working for, but because they’ll have exclusive rights to what I post there I’ll have to reserve this space for a much more personal reflection on my secret dreams and hidden desires.

… Yeah, right!