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.

Techman's World is now TLS-only!

Hello everyone!

Although it seems I lay dormant in these parts, I did have some time to swing by and notice that Blogger added a global SSL/TLS option for custom domain blogs. For those that aren't aware, it's actually another automated application of the free certificate platform Let's Encrypt, which I've personally used already for bringing trusted certificates to Techtronix servers.

I have set up all pages to redirect to the secured versions now, and I have tweaked Disqus to now work on these new pages. You should not encounter any mysterious mixed content errors, but if you do, don't hesitate to get in touch with me via the comments below or the contact form.

I am deciding on whether it would be worth it to write a small tutorial for enabling SSL connectivity on custom-domain Blogger sites, as it wouldn't be too difficult. For those that want to jump right to it, it's featured in the "Settings" area on the Blogger dashboard.

Techman's World turns 4!

If you're reading this, it's because Techman's World is now 4 years old! Even though I don't write very often on Techman's World anymore (that will change in 2016, I hope), I do always want to stop and acknowledge that I do care about the site, even when it appears that I'm gone for months at a time. Usually, though, I can be contacted by using the live chat, email/contact form, or using the comments section, though.

Techman's World has a new background!

After a few days of work, and more thinking, I have decided that the current background you see right now on the site will be the successor to the old background image that was used here. However, if there was any changes that were going to made, I'd probably change the orientation of the image.

Why I actually made this change

I actually made this change for a few reasons, some more important than others.

1. The old image was old
2. The old image was had a low resolution, which made the website look unprofessional.
3. The site needed a new look
4. Making a gradient was a fairly easy thing to do
5. The whole web in general is moving towards gradients, whether image or CSS3.

The actual gradient I am using is an image. Right now I do not have time to sit down and learn how to code in a CSS3 gradient, and I also want to maintain compatibility with earlier versions of Internet Explorer (ex. IE8). Even though my Internet Explorer audience is rather small, I am choosing not to alienate them with this change.

Feedback

If you want to post some feedback, you can do so in the comments below. You can also hit up the live chat (on the tab bar at the top) and drop some lines. The live chat has a nice amount of users who are in the lounge channel as well, so you can even discuss with them.

Some site design ideas

You know, for over 2 years now Techman's World has used the same background for the site, and almost the same amount of time for the logo. While the logo definitely isn't going away (although the colors could be slightly modified, who knows), I think that Techman's World could use a better & improved background image.

I'm leaning towards a gradient as a replacement for the background image, and it will most certainly contain the classic green and blue colors (hopefully anyways).

The decision to lean towards a gradient isn't a very hard one either -- These days it's relatively easy to make a gradient using tools such as GIMP and Adobe Photoshop. I remember when a friend of mine actually made a gradient using hand picked pixels -- boy was that time consuming.

Techman's World turns 2: Second birthday of Techman's World

...and you guys thought I was going to forget. Despite how busy I can be and sometimes neglect posting to this website, I still care about it very much.

Today, everyone, marks the second year of existence the entity known as Techman's World.

Over this year, I have done lots of things. One of the most significant things I did this year. One of the most notable things I did this year is review the System76 Lemur Ultra (before it was discontinued?). I also did review Bitdefender Internet Security 2013 and discuss various other topics on the site. Those two posts were just the highlights -- you can scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and access archive links for any month in the span of time that this website has existed.

Search has moved to a sub-domain

In an effort to make searches here on Techman's World more integrated and "native" feeling, I have been collaborating with Gawk.it founder Kevin Marshall to bring a feature for sites to use gawk.it on a sub-domain.

If you want to test out the new search box, go ahead and search. All searches are now sent to search.techmansworld.com; pretty nifty huh? :)

[Announcement] Site maintenance on post labels, and more maintenance to come

Just wanted to announce that I'll be doing some maintenance on post labels in the coming days. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed but for a while I've had duplicate labels for basically the same thing, for quite a few topics. Here's an example: I put "PS" on posts when I already had a "PlayStation" label.

While doing this, there could be quirks with the labeling system. You might see labels on posts that have nothing to do with the topic that the label describes. Blogger's rather scratchy label management system causes a few posts that I didn't even select to get labels removed or applied to them, for whatever reason. While it's a bug that I'm going to report, I wanted to give a heads up ahead of time for folks that might run across some quirks in the process.

Happy New Year! From Techman's World

This is probably my last round of holiday posts, but I'll go ahead and write it anyways.

HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS!

Merry Christmas, from Techman's World

Techman's World as a whole would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and have a happy new year! Michael wishes the best to all of you today. Have fun opening all of those great gadgets that you find under the tree this year.

So.....what did you get? Let me know in the comments below!

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.

Techman's World to review the System76 Gazelle Professional

A few hours ago I posted a picture of a box, leaned against my grandmother's freezer (that's where I was at the time). I'm not sure if I gave all of you enough time to figure this out, but I'm sure that you all have at least established that Techman is up to something.

Indeed I am. If you follow my Google+ feed from a few days ago, you see that I wrote a post saying that I was reviewing something -- the Gazelle Professional. The System76 Gazelle Professional is their second to last premier laptops. It was the only professional notebook they had for quite some time until the launch of the Bonobo Extreme. The Gazelle Professional can go way up there in terms of hardware power. It is all up to you and your budget.

[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.

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!