On Wednesday January 18, 2012, this site will be participating in the protest of the proposed SOPA bill – Stop Online Piracy Act. It, along with PIPA, are bills in the House and Senate that are designed to stop online piracy by way of changing certain parts of how the internet works. Yes, recently Rep. Lamar Smith-TX announced they are removing the DNS blocking portion of the bill. But even with all of the other provisions that remain, this bill is not the best option for stopping the illegal download of movies, music and media and intellectual property of artists and copyright owners.

There are other ways and methods of reducing piracy including the supporting of increasing legal options of obtaining media. And while there are legal methods today like Amazon and iTunes, the MPAA and RIAA have not fully embraced new media and spend more money litigating than they do promoting.

Seized

You will see the following graphic on my site tomorrow. DO NOT BE ALARMED!! MY SITE DIDN’T GET SEIZED FOR ILLEGAL ACTIVITY!!. All will be back to normal on Thursday.

a sample notice of a site that is seized
Original image found at Anondora.org

If you want to join in, feel free. Be creative or be simple. If these bills are passed, changes that are out of your hands could happen. Stop SOPA and Stop PIPA.

I’ve removed my Blogroll page. I know.. shocking.

Actually, it shouldn’t be shocking. The popularity and usefulness of the blogroll on people’s blogs has been waning for some time now. I’ve noticed a lot fewer blogrolls out on the blogs I visit and read.

Sure, it was a way to say, “hey, I like these blogs.. check them out.” But I got to wondering something. If I wasn’t looking at the blogrolls on other’s blogs, then how many people were looking at mine? If you do, let me know, but I’ll take a guess [and using my page results from Woopra and Google, it's not a page that gets hit that often] that it’s just not needed anymore.

If you miss it, then maybe I can do a post every so often where I mention blogs I visit.

And of course, if there’s a blog I like, I’ll add it to my feed reader and visit, read and comment.

So long Blogroll. You served your purpose back in the day.

I’ve updated my theme. The one I had before was pretty good and it was clean and had a nice look to it, but it was trouble whenever I changed some things around. I had to resolve that, especially if I wanted to move to WordPress 2.7.1 anytime soon. [I'm still at 2.6.5 for a couple more weeks]

Gone is the ad in the upper right part of the header. Also gone are the colors. Gray and black may seem bland, but I decided that the cleaner, sleeker look would be much easier on the eyes. And my eyes are not getting any better these days.

Also, the Blogroll is now on it’s own page. Something about better page results for SEO.

In time, I’m also going to go back to my older posts and take some of the extra formatting that the previous theme needed to display properly. Things like extra line breaks and odd paragraph formatting will be a lot smoother.

I’m also still working on some graphics and other enhancements to this site, which this new theme should be easier to configure for the future.

So hit me up in the comments with any feedback, problems, issues or praise.