Woa, what’s this? Where am I? Who am I?

If you’re asking yourself any of those questions – well, all except for the last one – don’t fret, you are most probably at the right place.

I’ve updated the site to WordPress 3.0 and am currently working on reactivating all the plugins on the site.  This means that for the next few hours, certain pages may look funny or be missing.

If you encounter such a page, don’t worry, I’m working on fixing it all up.  I’ll give a shout once everything is back to normal.

UPDATE 1: Well I’m done for the day.  Everything seems to be back up and running, we’ve got a new theme and some new functionality.  Check it out, and let me know what you think

UPDATE 2: I’ve had to dissable the contact page as it wasn’t working properly.  I’ll be looking for  areplacement, but in the meantime you need to reach me, you may do so by email (if you already have my address), or by commenting on a post.

So expect the site to change a bit as I test plugin and theme compatibility with this new version.

Super Squirrel - One of a handful of new pen drawings in the Folaji Galleries

As promised in my last post, I’m proud to announce a new feature on Folaji: Galleries.

Just as the stories section of the site contains written stories, the galleries section will contain images, drawings, and photos of anybody willing to contribute.  There isn’t much in there right now, but expect the number of images to grow with time.

To celebrate the launch of the Folaji Galleries, I’ve added a new album of drawings that I like to call PenArt.  You see, I have a pretty wild imagination and, when I’m bored or stuck in a daydream, I have a tendency to doodle.

Typically, the doodle begins as a few random strokes of a pen on a paper, and then my imagination kicks in and the image turns into something completely unexpected.  Its a fun, relaxing process that passes the time when I have nothing better to do (which is really not as often as I’d like ).

You can view all the images of the PenArt Album at once here, or view them in an automatic slideshow here.

Enjoy!

In the meantime, for those of you following the RAWR adventure, Ingram was nice enough to provide an update that you can read here.

That being said, anybody looking for this week’s Blog Tools Review can find it on FuglyCode.com.  This week I detail a very important anti-spam plugin called Akismet, which you can read here.  Note that, as I stated previously, Blog Tools Reviews will now only be posted on FuglyCode.com, so head on over to the new site every Wednesday at 12pm EST for your weekly dose of blog plugin fun!

Also, after almost a year of hiatus, Rise of the X-Syndicate is back with Chapter 7 – The Fall.  I found this chapter extremely difficult to write, partly because I wasn’t to certain how I wanted to present the conflict in the chapter, and mostly because it truly is a backbone for so much of what’s to come.  With it now published, I feel like I’ve jumped a huge hurdle, and future chapters are all starting to fall into place.

And finally, although I am spending much time on FuglyCode right now, I still have big plans for this site.  I intend to begin adding new content over the next few months, which will allow the site to grow into a much more rounded and interesting site.  I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Talk to y’all later!

I’ve been working on this new site for a couple of weeks now, and noticed that the content of the Blog Tools Review articles was much more suitable for this site than for Folaji.com.  And so I’ve ported the series over, and will continue on publishing Blog Tools Reviews everyweek on FuglyCode.com.

With the launch of the new site, I’ve not yet had the chance to publish Chapter 7 of Rise of the X-Syndicate.  I can say for a fact that it will be posted this week, so keep an eye out for a new Chapter of this World of Warcraft story.

In the meantime, I leave you with a montage of my dog Koji, playing with an 8 week old black lab named Ramsay.  Aren’t they adorable?

I like it because this is probably the first site that I’ve ever created for myself, and after a year and a half online, I find nothing more relaxing than sitting back and looking at my site, which I built the way I wanted to, without the constant input from some external party about advertising revenues and traffic statistics.

Its not that I hate developing sites for other,  I’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember, and I don’t see any reason why I would stop.  But there is something liberating about creating a site that is yours and yours alone, a site where you have final say on content, look and feel, and overall organization.

And that’s what Folaji.com is for me: a place I can escape to and be myself, where I can publish ideas, stories, and videos that had once only been a sentence on a piece of paper in an old binder.  A place where others can come and read those stories, discuss them, and share their own if they would like.  (Ok, maybe the Folaji.com community isn’t big enough for that yet, but hey, I can dream, can’t I?)

Alright, so why am I writing all this?  Well, I came to the realization a few days ago that none of this would be possible if not for the array of wonderful free web tools available online.  When you look at this site, you should understand that the look and feel, the blog engine, the different tools showing up on the side bar, were all developed by a large online community of bloggers and developers that offer their products for free.  If it weren’t for these people and their willingness to share their tools with the online community, then Folaji.com would only be a shadow of its current self.

So I decided that, as a thank you for everyone’s efforts, I would take the time over the coming months to review each widget, plugin and tool I use on Folaji.com.  This would be my way of thanking the community for such great work, and for allowing me to create this site, and hopefully will encourage others to do the same.

First, the WordPress engine has been upgraded to the latest version.  This upgrade has been a long time coming, but hadn’t been applied yet due to incompatibility with certain plugins.  If you’re interested in details of the upgrade, you can view a quick video in the link below.  Its mostly back end changes that make my life easier, but hey, who doesn’t want to make my life easier, right?

WordPress 2.9 Features

Next bit of news, the Forums have been retired/removed/not there anymore.  Now this shouldn’t be a surprise as I’d explained how I planned to remove them a couple of weeks back.  I just want to say that the people at SimplePress have made a wonderful forums plugin, but when it came down too it, however, the forums were simply no longer useful for this site.

But what happened to all the cool stuff we talked about?

I did make a backup before uninstalling the plugin, so everything is still somewhere.  Also, I’ve moved the RAWR update posts to the blog, and you can now find them under the DnD Weekly Updates category (there’s also a link on the RAWR page).

Oh, and one more thing: I have another blog hidden somewhere on the web that I’ll be incorporating with Folaji.com.  I’ve been thinking about it, and although the subject matter of the other blog is not really related to this site, there’s no real reason why I can’t merge the two together and just create a different category on this site.  So, expect some different and interesting content in the coming weeks.

Go ahead, try it out!

NOTE: From what I understand, you need JavaScript enabled and Flash installed for the tag cloud to work.

1. I’m a nerd and like charts
2. I realize that there are some times when the blog is not updated, and I want to show that, even though there are no new posts, content is being prepared
3. I was surfing blogs and found an example of this kind of page on Danie Ford’s blog, and found it pretty nifty

Since I use a methodology when I write, I’ve purposely added more detail to the larger projects, and also decided to use code names to identify them so as to keep some element of mystery .  So if you’re ever wondering what I’m up to, or when a certain story post is finally going to be available, now all you have to do is check the Progress Page.