A Full Decade of Techman's World! 🎂🎉

Even though I don't post a lot, following annual tradition I'd like to announce that this site is now a whopping 10 years old! A whole decade! I can remember the birth of this place like it happened yesterday...I was awake around 1:22 AM fooling around on the internet on how to make my own blog/website, and I eventually started Techman's World on the Blogger platform. That said, every 18th of December adds another notch to the metaphorical rope that is the life of Techman's World.

How to View Now-Broken Images on Techman's World (Pre-October 2015)

As I reported a few weeks ago, essentially all images became broken on this website due to a mistake I made by removing some of my sharing preferences on OneDrive. Unfortunately, I cannot fix the problem as easily as I'd like since you can no longer set a folder to be public on OneDrive. I've reached out to the Microsoft forums and couldn't get any help. Still debating on calling Microsoft, but I don't think that will be as effective either. I know that someone at Microsoft HQ could help me, but I doubt that they would.

So in the meantime, all you can do is give folders links for folks to access instead. So, click here to access all site resources used in the past. I'm really sorry folks, but there's nothing that I can do about this. I really wish I could set the resources folder back to Public so all site images would work again, but I can't. I'm truly frustrated that this has happened, and the time it would take to fix every single post is ridiculous.

If you come across a broken image link that references 'livefilestore', it is probably an image from OneDrive. Append authkey=!AHBqdGRL8sRgPB8 to the end of the URL as a parameter and it should work. I am slowly updating the most important posts that require images, but I will probably miss a few.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 gun reviews coming soon

A few weeks ago, I got an email from one of my viewers asking about gun reviews for the game Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. A few weeks ago I published an article about the highs and lows of the Peacekeeper sub-machine gun, and even though there were no comments published, it turns out that some viewers actually like it.

Techman's World needs your help!

If you follow this website for the past few weeks, you might know that news and reviews (especially) were and still are slow. While I can work on the news part, reviews at this point are hitting a stand-still. I'm not talking about software reviews, but rather hardware reviews.

The latest and first hardware I've done was on the System76 Gazelle Professional. That was my first hardware review on this site, and it turned out to be a great success, inspiring people to actually buy the same model laptop and of course getting a great amount of traffic for both websites, mine and their's.

Sadly, that review is also the latest one I've done, so basically this means that I have only done one review so far on this website. I want to change that, but my efforts alone aren't getting me where I want to be: reviewing products as a service to you guys, not to me.

Introducing Techman's World IRC

Weeks and weeks ago I announced that I was busy on building a test server for UnrealIRCd, and eventually Anope IRC services. That project back then was mainly a test to see if I can actually get a (very beta) IRC setup going. I'm proud to say that I've graduated from that.

If anyone subscribes to Google Alerts for this website, or follows the domain at all, I created a new website (powered by Blogger for now anyways) located at tmwirc.techmansworld.com. The sub-domain is now live and most help info relating to the network is already posted. The things I haven't quite done or gotten to yet is the actual terms of service for the network, and the privacy policy. I can say right now that the terms will be in line with the main site's existing policies.

[Announcement] Contact Form Restored

After a few days between the last post I made, which announced the disablement of the old contact form, I finally switched form providers in hopes that they will be better anyways.

[Announcement] Contact Form Disabled

Recently, about two days ago, I got massively spammed via the contact form. It has bot measures, but it appears that the person who did this was in fact real.

About two days ago I got hit with about 200 form submissions, all containing useless submissions. In fact, even the default text was there as the message text, saying that you can make the submission as long as you like. Otherwise, the emails were pretty much fake as well.

Happy birthday Techman's World: the first year of something big

Well, today is the day. The day in question is the a birthday, for this website. This is officially this site's first birthday.

That's right, if you check back to the first post (which was a hello world really), it was written December 18, 2011. Should have been around 1 am-ish too. I remember it like it was yesterday. 

[Announcement] 1000 posts and counting

It appears to be that time again, and surprisingly I am actually 3 posts late with this one, making this post the 1004th post.

In this series of 100 posts, I made a few site improvements. The site had some new bugs introduced by some of the recent updates I was making, and I eventually fixed all of them.

I fixed some of the widgets as well. The recent posts widget was giving me tons of problems and after a few days I eventually found a widget from a maker that actually worked and had very high hopes of not being borked.

[Announcement] Issues fixed

Well, after yesterday's post I have finally fixed all of the issues stated above. One of the issues fixed was the rotating banner. Thanks to a friend in IRC, I placed style rules just for the banner in the head tags, under a custom Unity script I wrote for Ubuntu. The banner should now spin just fine, it not you'll have to clear your cache to see the changes.

The recent posts widget is fixed. I found an even better widget that does the same as the original  The widget displays 26 posts at a time, and loads slightly faster than the old widget I had before this that broke as well.

[Announcement] Recent posts widget removed from site

A few weeks ago I talked about some of the site changes I am working on. I was trying to fix a problem with the recent posts widget, but so far I have been no where. Then the other day  I found a temporary solution, another working widget but I did not like it as much. Earlier today that gadget is now broken as well, or some kind of error happens that is out of my control.

So for at last a day or two I have pulled the recent posts widget off of the site. I apologise if this affects anyone, but until then I need to find something that works and does not break something on the site.

[Announcement] Mobile template problem fixed

A few weeks ago, I launched a site wide redesign that should make content easier to read and also make the website look more professional at the same time. During the past few weeks I have been looking into user experience, and so far everything has been positive.

There was a few quarks in the template, and I corrected those very quickly. One thing that I did not correct so fast was the mobile button problem. What would happen is you would use the mobile site, and the text over the blue buttons actually blended in with the blue color, instead of being white like it was supposed to and how it was in the old template.

Announcement: "More" tab added to page bar, policies merged

Techman's World is on a roll! Just because the site was updated with a redesign a few days ago, that doesn't mean that the design is not going to be updated. If you noticed yesterday there is now a "More" tab in the page bar. This is for the newly added sitemap that gives you links to all of the independent pages on Techman's World. All of the links have been removed from the footer to save space. And currently the footer of the site is already kind of too big.

The second change is the policies. Before there was only a comment policy. Now all policies are merged into one. This can be founed on the "more" page.

Techman's World Gets a Redesign

Hello readers,

As you have now noticed, Techman's World has finally gotten an update to the site that is supposed to be beneficial to everyone, and Techman's World itself.

If you guys remember, I wrote a post a few weeks ago asking if I needed to do a redesign, and based on community response I decided to go though with it. I did try to redesign the template before, and it failed because I couldn't find a way to get the comments to work.

I did the redesign this morning, via Blogger's template editor. I heavily modied it, so you should not notice any customization differences in terms of custom CSS styles, if you pay attention to that.

The template should perform well in every browser, including (hopefully) Internet Explorer 9. If you can, please load up a page in IE9 and see if everything functions correctly. Everything should work or at least look decent, and comments should load correctly.

So, let me know in the comments below on what you think.

Techman's World on Google+

If you haven't taken a spin over to the social page now present in the page bar, then maybe you should. Recently I have been taking all of my social accounts used and or associated with Techman's World and put them there. I have items such as email and IRC there as well.

Just recently I have included Google+ links there as well, so you are welcome to check those out.

Announcement: Changes in the title HTML tag

If you have been visiting Techman's World over the past two days, you might have noticed that the title of posts in your browser has been a little bit changed.

What as going on was I have been recently making large strides to step up Techman's World SEO ranking. SEO is search engine optimization. SEO is very important in making web sites, because it affects how your site will be seen in search results from search engines around the web.

900 posts!

It's. that time again....time for another 100 post update. Not much has happened in this change, except the recent domain migrations that I made. I'm not sure if I covered that in another "xxx posts!" article, so I'm mentioning it here just in case.

One thing that I am working on, though, is the template. Right now there is a terrible IE problem with the template, and it applies to IE9. I have a meta tag to load the page in IE8 compatibility view, and yet the site still breaks. Something on the page is messing up the page render settings, so it can most of the time make all of the widget borders turn purple and hide iframes, or at least turn iframes to the color white. Because of this, as well as some more feedback, I was considering changing the template anyways. I tried a simple template yesterday, and It was only live on the site for about 2 minutes at the most. The template did not contain a <div id="comments"> section, so Disqus could not be embedded into normal posts. To fix this, I simply uploaded a template backup that I made earlier before making changes. Smart move on my part.

Wow...Techman's World is really getting old. It is quickly arriving its 1000th post, and of course when Techman's World has its 1 year anniversary in December. I currently do not know what to do to celebrate, but that is another time for me to think about that.

Other then template changes, and the domain migrations, nothing much else has happened. Oh -- I did update the page bar. I'll be making a few more changes to make all site social features visible, or at least known in a better matter.

Anyways...happy reading!

Annoucement: Redesign Needed?

Dear readers,

Today I am writing to you today to ask you all a simple question: do you think the site should be redesigned? Recently I have gotten requests/tips from some more experienced web developers on the internet, and they are all saying that I should redesign my site with a more professional look. I'm guessing that it might be time to ask the community of their input.

Announcement: Discovery Box Disabled For Now

Dear Readers,

Just wanted to tell you all that I am temporally disabling the Discovery Box in the comment section on this site. Why? Because it is very simple - discovery listings are not all that accurate at all. For example, if the page in question is the recent Dolphin Web Browser review, then why am I getting results about comment trouble? Makes no sense to me, and if I had promoted discovery enabled here, the results would be just as accurate, or lack of accuracy with the article.

500 Posts of Techman's World

Another milestone for Techman's World. Today, Techman's World has reached 500 posts, and just over 17,000 page views.

Along with that, the site has been through many changes, all for the good. From better logo's to better customizations. The creator of this site has even been sharing his software projects here.

This website runs off of one person, and wants you to spread the word. So if you love to visit Techman's World, please do a favor and just spread the word. The reason I keep investing time into this is because I know that I do have a community, small or not, that enjoys to come here.

Thanks to all who come here.