This isn’t rocket science, and this will be a big ‘duh’ for most of you reading this out there, but successful blogging is all about quality original content composition.

So much blogging is posting and rehashing news and information found elsewhere on the web. I’m as guilty as any other blog of mailing in posts simply with a couple of sentences and an external link.

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Through no fault of my own, my daily post streak has been broken by the past few days of Keefer Madness web silence.

It turns out the data center down in Texas (centralized location) that hosts Keefer Madness had some catastrophic failures including exploding power supplies, fires, etc. So anyway, Keefer Madness seems to be no worse for the wear, save a gap in posts so far in June. Starting today, daily posts will resume again. It’s unfortunate that the post streak had to break at the halfway point of the year, but at least it wasn’t my fault.

Expect regular posts once again, and let’s hope for better redundancies and uptime from my web host.

Doing a Google search, I’m starting to see more and more references to Keefer Madness that aren’t me or my site. I’ve had this web site for 8 years and have had the domain just as long. 1) Don’t I have copyright on that starting in 2000? 2) Should I go after people and sites for diluting my “brand?”

Any lawyers out there that read Keefer Madness.

Google Search for ‘Keefer Madness’

Oh, and Wayback Machine has proof of me using that site back to March of 2001.

So, new WordPress software came out several weeks back – a fairly major overhaul marked 2.5. I decided to wait till they at least released one bug fix for it before installing it here and on another site (2.5.1).

Well, Friday night, I upgraded the other site with no problems. Keefer Madness though bombed this morning with a fairly obscure error. I had the same problem these guys had. I just deleted that one line though and looks like everything is fine. Nothing should have changed on the front end for Keefer Madness, but the new admin panels for WordPress will take a little bit of getting used to. Off to pack the car for the Iron Gate Time Trial.

Quick week recap here late Friday night: So it’s been a hellish week. I built two full web sites and put in a ton of hours to do so. One site is already live here. The other should be live early next week pending client approval. I’m glad it’s the weekend and glad we’re not traveling. We’re going to keep it low key this weekend, except for cheering on the Heels again Kansas. Here’s to hoping we’ll have a Heels game to watch Monday night as well.

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So far, so good this year with my promise of having at least one new post everyday. We’re 52 days into 2008, and I’ve been able to keep that up. The biggest challenge will be during travel. The trusty iPhone should help with that some.

But anyway, after writing my long-ass post the other day on my first crit of 2008, I realized I not only need to keep the daily posting up, but also make more longer posts that are my own content like that one – partially for the SEO benefits, but also just so that my whole site isn’t just one link aggregator. Most of the site, I’m making these posts just for myself – things that interest me and pique my interest, but I’d like to think I have others out there reading Keefer Madness on occasion.

I’d love to get some feedback, comments, questions, etc. once in awhile if anyone else is actually getting anything out of the site, besides me. But regardless, writing the longer content is fun, but time-consuming. I’m going to be trying my best to write more of those posts.

If you have a moment, please register and comment on occasion. I’d love to hear from people actually regularly reading, or those who’ve stumbled upon Keefer Madness somehow (except those damned spambots!).

So with the new look for Keefer Madness, that I’ve really grown to love (including Word Press’ backend stuff), I’m trying to impose some new guidelines that I’m trying to follow whenever possible, mainly for aesthetics and quality of content:

1. Longer posts – I’ve found Keefer Madness looks better when there’s meat to my posts. I’m really going to try to avoid posting a simple link to another site, but rather inject my own opinions and how things affect me whenever possible. After all, this is Keefer Madness! I also love how Word Press has the simple, but great way to break up a post – choosing where you want to have it paginate to another page. It’s wonderful for posts like the one recently about Bongo’s Adventure, or any of my reviews.
2. Images – Take a look at the couple of posts I did directly before this one. I really like the way they look with an image in there. It breaks up the text. It adds some visual appeal and it dots Keefer Madness with some color. While every post won’t have an image, I’m going to try to include one as often as possible. But like with this one, I’m not going to put some lame-ass clip art in, for the sake of having an image, but maybe I’ll dig up an old photo from Flickr or something.
3. Daily Posts – This isn’t a new one, but it’s one I want to reaffirm. I really want to make at least one post daily. If there is anyone out there reading this regularly, besides Amanda (Hi baby!), I’d like them to have something new to look at every day, if they so choose to come daily. So I ‘m trying to stick to at least one post a day. Unfortunately, often, there isn’t anything to post about, or more likely, I don’t end up with the time to post something. When work’s slow (today!), I end up posting multiple times. On those busy days, I’m hoping I’ll be able to squeek at least a single post in.

In case anyone missed them or even noticed they were gone, I’ve posted all of the reviews I’ve written over the years. I haven’t written anything recently since the Kelly Clarkson concert review I did a few years back. The hope is that I’ll start posting new reviews on occasion, most likely Xbox 360 reviews, TV reviews or maybe a movie review or two. I may be a little rusty, but hopefully, I’ll be able to get right back into it. Links are below to the list of reviews.

Game Reviews
Miscellaneous Reviews
Movie Reviews
Music Reviews
TV Reviews

So you’re looking at the new and improved Keefer Madness. I’ve switch from Movable Type over to Word Press after I was tasked at work to look at Word Press at work for a client to use down the road.

So after a couple of upgrade headaches and switching to my Web host’s newer server, Keefer Madness is back up. I’ve removed all the extraneous content from my site and whittled it down to basically just my KeefLog (blog). Some of the content, I’ll bring back in as blog posts (all of my reviews), and I’ll make a section for my portfolio.

I setup a test blog with Word Press over at their site here and fell in love with that theme / design. Unfortunately, after scouring around last night, I couldn’t find a way to use that particular theme when Word Press is hosted on my own site. There are a few speed bumps like that one to overcome. The plan is to eventually create my own theme of my design (CSS, etc.). But for now, you may notice some change in the look and feel as I find a theme that I like for the interim (which could be awhile).

But overall, I just wanted to refresh the site and hopefully get some more traffic here. So far so good.. just more work ahead of me to get it to 100%.

*sigh* Why do people do this type of stuff? I just came onto my site and had this message, “SPYKIDS OWNZ YOU Contacts? spykids.br@gmail.com.”

It’s some sort of PHP exploit. I can get to my BLog’s control panel, but that’s it. It looks like my Web host, Z3 is having the problem too, along with some clients I’ve done designs for… It makes sense because they’re all on the same Web host. By the time you see this, it’s fixed. I just hope it’s not long after I posted this.