A good question that many people have asked me lately is, “Where have you been since Dec. 13, 2010?”

A good question that you might have just came up with is, “Where did you come up with Dec 13, 2010?”

For the past half year or so, I’ve been getting better at not abandoning my website for an extended period of time, but I did that for a while starting from December 13, which was the last real blog post of 2010. I have a blog post from December 17 too, but it just had a link to a video I made on YouTube and wasn’t exactly a blog. The thing is, the actual video itself was made far before December 17, but was released on that date because it was a video directly related to an event taking place on that date.

I’ve been extremely busy with academics even before December 13, and to get the highest grades possible, I stopped releasing major updates to my website to focus on my course work. My final exams spanned between December 18th and 22nd, and immediately after my last exam, I came back home and was busy with stuff back here. But enough about my life, time to update you on the status of the website, as the “Site News” title suggests I should.

To make up for the major lack of new content in the past half month or so, I’ve been doing more website work than normal in the past few days since I got home. Whenever I have free time (which is quite often, now), I come up with ideas on either how to improve existing pages, or what new content to add.

For example, for improving existing pages, I have been slowly merging and moving content I used to have on my Resources page to my Articles page. A lot of articles in Resources were short and required the viewing of multiple pages to get the whole picture of what I was talking about. To make it more cohesive, I put all the related articles (such as an article about one topic split into multiple articles) into one page, then moved it from Resources to Articles. I’m down to only a handful of pages left in Re­sources, and hope to completely eliminate the Resources section soon. All URLs pointing to Resources will be automatically redirected to the new corresponding page in the Articles section.

The Articles page itself has gotten some new content in addition to moved content. Although it may not be apparent at first, there will be a handful of new articles in various categories added to the Articles page. The reason it may not seem like it has been updated for a while is because I pre-date time-sensitive articles. Some topic ideas that I came up with a long time ago apply to that time period, and the way in which I would have written the article would have most likely changed if I had known the new information that time discovered. If you’re an avid reader of my articles, you shouldn’t have a problem noticing the new ones. If you’re not, then you shouldn’t be too worried about it, because there are a lot of articles that you haven’t already read anyway.

A section of my website that you might have forgotten about is Five Minutes in My Head, the older version of my blog. Nothing has been added to it since I made my final post on June 24, but there are still a few changes that I have made. First, I (once again) restructured the back-end of the PHP file that runs Five Minutes in My Head, hopefully making it more efficient. I am also in the process of changing the URLs of the images embedded in all the posts. To save bandwidth and disk space on my web server, I have already uploaded all the images used in Five Minutes in My Head to my Picasa Web account with Google. All I have to do now is finish updating the URLs.

My blog will hopefully be getting more posts in the near future. (There will be a new post tomorrow for sure.) It’s difficult to find interesting things to blog about, as there’s usually nothing interesting happening at home, but I’ll be on the look-out of funny stories to share. Once I get back to my apartment and resume courses at university, the regularity of my blog posts will likely return. In the worst-case scenario, I can still talk about the boring things I do for those who care, or do reviews of things I read and watch that day like I used to (if I end up having enough time to read books or watch movies).

As for my video blogs (on YouTube), those have been on hold since November. Making videos takes a lot more time than simply writing a blog post. It also requires more effort, as my facial expressions and body language is visible, making it more personal with the audience. It’s also difficult to find good topics to make videos about, as something that could suffice as a quick post on my written blog does not necessarily make a good video. I have a video planned out that I will be releasing on January 12, 2011.

And finally, the banner advertisement that has been at the bottom of all my blog posts as of lately (and is at the bottom of this Site News post as well) expires today. That means that you have an opportunity to get your advertisement on my website. If you’re interested, feel free to contact me, but keep in mind that I’m very selective about who I accept as advertisers and what the advertisements look like, because these advertisements are more integrated with the content instead of offset in a separte area. I also tend to give priority to my friends who wish to advertise with me. Keep in mind that I do contracts by the number of pages, not by impressions, as once your advertisement is on the page, it is there permanently, even if your website gets shut down or becomes dormant.

As always, feel free to use the Contact Form or any other methods of contact found on my profile page to give me any feedback about this page or my website in general.