This will officially be the last post of 2007. What a year it’s been for this particular blog. Jeffro2pt0 started in May 2007 and since then, has continued to grow by leaps and bounds. I wanted to take a moment and thank each and every one of you for making 2007 a hell of a year for the blog. All of you who have subscribed to the RSS feed, commented on the blog, participated in the discussions and helped me out along the way have really helped to make this blog a success. I couldn’t of done it without you and I look forward to what 2008 may bring.

To illustrate the kind of year this blog had, I’ve taken the following screenshot of my AWStats page for the year 2007.

Blog Stats

There are currently 401 posts and 820 comments, contained within 15 categories and 1,872 tags.

Spam

Akismet has protected your site from 6,547 spam comments.

Stats In Total For 2007:

New Year Means New Design:

As you may have noticed, the blog now sports a new design. It’s not really a major redesign, it’s more like a reshuffling/reorganization of content. I’ve removed one of the sidebars and have opted for one, large sidebar. I’ve also installed an Archive plugin and have turned the Archives into it’s own seperate page so that I could free up more space within the sidebar. I’ve made the shoutbox wider, moved the MyBlogLog reader widget to the bottom left part of the site, replaced the Recent Forum Posts module at the top left corner of the site with the Last 5 Blog Posts module and in 2008, I will add in a tag cloud. I will be condensing all of the categories into tags and from now on, blog posts will be organized by tags instead of seperate categories. Last but not least, I have widened the content area of the site by about 30 or 40 more pixels.

I also realize that the blog looks horrible in IE7, again. I will work on this during the month of January but until then, please browse my blog using FireFox.

On the backend of things, I have uninstalled numerous plugins. Most notable is the SideBlog plugin. I’ll stick to Twitter for those types of posts. You might also be surprised that I have removed the SezWho comment rating system as well as the Cliqin widget. It’s not that I don’t believe in these services, its that they weren’t being used to their fullest extent on the blog. So instead of keeping the blog polluted with stuff thats not being used, I opted to get rid of those features completely.

If you are one of the bloggers that joined Cliq or displays the Cliqin widget because of me, you now have the option to keep it published or take it off your own blog.

One other thing worth mentioning. A loyal RSS Feed Subscriber notified me today that the HeaderEntry plugin which adds copyright information to the beginning of a post when it’s being scraped or read through a FeedReader was actually keeping him from seeing what any of my posts were about. My guess is, he has his FeedReader setup to display this blog’s feed as a summary and that summary was nothing more than a copyright spiel. So, I have removed the plugin. Please let me know if the Feed returns to normal for you and thanks Lee also known as LGR for pointing this out to me.

The Forum Is No More:

The forum which is powered by Vbulletin and cost me $85.00 has been taken offline. The forum simply has not worked out as well as I thought it would. It’s actually had a negative effect on the blog. The forum has separated the forum users, from the blog users. I’m running out of time trying to update the forum to keep content fresh and there hasent’t been too many new members signing up as late. Therefor, I am going to go back to using the blog as a forum and not worry about having a seperate entity for the forum until I become uber popular. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. All of the forum posts and user data will be backed up and saved onto my hard drive so nothing will be lost. If I have a change of heart, we’ll start right back where we left off.

In Closing:

Thank you for your support throughout the year of 2007. I hope you and yours truly have a successful and happy New Year. Only four more to go until 2012!