(UPDATE 12/16/2009 = due to some legal technicalities, I changed the domain and revamped my business site.)

Engipress is my professional output for anything and everything related to WordPress. I designed the WordPress Theme, designed the vBulletin forum skin, and I even went out of my way to find great mods to enhance the forum posting experience, all done by myself (to assist in showcasing my skills).

The designs are intertwined to give a great overall similar feel for the new website structure (The vBulletin forum sits atop the WP Theme forum), so the forum doesn’t impair the blog’s CSS layout or font stylings.

Perhaps the main attraction of this new website for me will be to contract freelance website work for those using WordPress as either a Blog or Content Management System. Just visit my hire page to see what services I offer. I’m very flexible with the pricing as I realize different people will require different needs for what they want to accomplish.

Also as a FYI, any posts relating to WordPress or blogging will probably be made on my Engipress Blog from now on. This doesn’t mean I’ll be neglecting Lightning Shock, it just represents the fact that my personal website will be shifting directions in a sense.

I feel I’m doing everyone a favor by providing this great resource to anyone who uses wordpress or plans to.

The new page, entitled “Recent Comments” is basically just what it says, a list of the last 15 comments made on various posts around the site.

All I did was create an RSS widget (based off of my widgetized page tutorial). In addition to this, I also made a few homepage changes, nothing too major.

Now readers have an easier way to keep track of current social activity of Lightning Shock.

Between recovering from surgery, completing school work, continuing my project, and other general life situations, I haven’t had much time to focus on writing quality posts and creating great concepts for you to follow.

I’ve spoken with my Doctor and have a scheduled reattachment surgery (from my ileostomy) on December 17th (two days after my birthday). Also it’ll still take five to seven days to recover in the hospital (and about a month after that to recover from this next surgery).

So after that time period, the activity on the website should pick up by then.

WARNING: Some Graphic Pictures are ahead, view them at your own risk, if you can handle all the bodily gory type of stuff.

The Beginning

About 10 years ago I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, which affects the digestive system, more specifically within the intestines. It’s not a fun disease to have, but it’s been manageable with daily tablets of Mercaptopur.

Yes, I have Crohn’s, it’s not transmittable to other people or anything, but it’s still a pretty major disease that affects my diet, my weight, and my energy levels.

More Recently

For the past month or so I started to notice frequent aches in my back that wouldn’t get better as time moved on. They started around the beginning of Summer Vacation, so I figured the pain was due to the immense amount of time I spent on my computer at home, or due to lack of exercise. This clearly wasn’t the case.

On Independence Day, July 4, the pain was so unbearable I was emitted to the emergency room. Let me just say here that Morphine is gooooood, very relaxing. The emergency staff couldn’t find anything wrong with me, so they sent me home with a Brett Favre Starter Kit (Vicadin). Luckily though, I already had a regularly scheduled Gastroenterology appointment coming up next week Wednesday, so my Doctor could help find out what was wrong with me.

That day was when he told me I wasn’t going anywhere. I was given a CAT scan, a large abnormal abscess around the size of a baseball was discovered eating away towards the end of my small intestine, I required emergency surgery. (An abscess is basically a globby pile of pus created by the Crohn’s Disease.) If the abscess were to have ruptured, I could have easily gone into shock and died.

The Surgery

The next day, Thursday, was when everything all went down. The surgeon was able to remove the abscess without rupturing it, along with about a foot of my small intestine.

Waking up in the recovery room was horrible though. It was the worst physical pain I had ever felt in my life. But overall, the surgery was successful.

The scars aren’t very pretty either. For one, I received an ileostomy and now have a stoma for excrementation. Basically, it means I have a hole in my belly for pooping from my small intestine:

A bag is placed over the hole so waste droppings can come out without me feeling a thing. The bag is usually emptied about three times a day, it still freaks me out. Luckily though, in my case, this sort of condition will 99% likely be reversible.

Also, here is the incision wound from removing the abscess, along with an ileostomy bag placed over my stoma:

It heals on it’s own, with the aide of a wound vacuum. They kept it open like this to drain the rest of the infection easier. There are also bandaging and foam inserts that must be changed three times a week. It hurts every time it gets changed. I don’t remember what day the photos were taken though, I think it was on the Sunday after surgery.

You wouldn’t believe how much that vac pack values in at.

$100? Nope.

$1000? Not even close.

$10,000? Keep going.

The system has a rough value of $25,000. Yeah, I know VERY expensive. My family’s not paying for it though, we’re only renting it for the duration of the healing process. And the insurance company is covering most of the costs.

The Aftermath

I spent the next week recovering from the intestinal surgery in a hospital bed until I was finally healthy enough to go home.

Obviously now I’m currently able to type and still use a computer while functioning properly, that started today. The wound should heal over a total of eight weeks and we’re still discussing with the doctor whether reattachment surgery is a possibility. Obviously this has indefinitely postponed my project, I’ll update in awhile, but I won’t be working on it for a long time.

This whole sidetrack also affected my school plans for the fall, which I’ll have to work on to see just when and how everything will work out.

My Project

Basically I’m building my own Content Management System from scratch. I’m really just beginning to get into the goodness of PHP and MySQL, and the functions they offer, what goes where, etc. I’ve rarely used either besides administering my blog and the conspiracy forums, so I barely had any knowledge of either language directly beforehand.

Why?

Just for fun. I think I’d be good at creating something useful for people. Although from a technical standpoint, I’m making it solely for my own needs, but others may use it too if they wish.

I’m going to do everything for the CMS, program it, design it, manage it, etc. I’ll probably make an announcement when it’s completed, but it’s nothing big or anything, just for people to know about it, if they want to see it, give feedback, or whatever. It’ll probably take months to complete too, given I’m new to most of the concepts I’ll be using.

So, yeah, if I’m not around on the forums as much, or pertaining to blog updates, that’s what I’ve been working on (in addition to my internship that is, which is unrelated).

School

With finals coming up, I haven’t had much spare time to write new posts as frequently or respond to comments on already current posts.

I’ll be done with everything this school year around the middle of may or so, then I’ll be able to refocus my attention on my websites and create interesting posts for everyone.

A New Plugin

Vangogh is helping out with a new WordPress plugin to assist my comment structure, which is an extension of the Brian’s Threaded Comments WordPress Plugin. The initial modification was a part of his new blog design, where he explains why he made the changes.

So don’t sweat if I haven’t replied to your comments yet, I want everything to look just right once it’s finished, then I’ll be glad to reply.

New 2-Column layout

I have removed the left column of my blog, it was beginning to piss me off, so it received a good ol’ fashion whoopin’ behind the wood shed. Ok, mainly it was because the columns were growing uneven. Plus two columns take up less screen space than three column formats.

The monthly archives were removed due to addition of the main archives page.

Navigation Menu Changes

Although this was done a few days ago, might as well say it here for those who haven’t noticed. I removed the Privacy Statement and Disclaimer from the top nav menu, and placed the links at the bottom of the page, in the footer. They seem to belong there better.

Also I added a search page (powered by Google). Now you can find all your favorite portions of Lightning Shock Posts or comments much quicker. If you can’t find the search page though, you either need to get a better monitor, glasses, or re-evaluate why your surfing the web. (Hint: the link is near the top)

Additional Info

And finally I moved some of the pages around and created a few new categories for them. (Specifically for “Internet”, as my miscellaneous category was getting too big and diverse.) This’ll be an ongoing process (not daily, but ever month or so when I write more creative posts that could be categorized better. Don’t forget too take notice on my, new egotistical parent categories I created.

That’s about it for now. Along with a new static home page I’ll likely be creating this week, I may make a few more additions that I haven’t mentioned, in which case I’ll update this post, if they’re soon.

OK, they didn’t “really” offer me that much money for my blog, in fact they haven’t even made me an offer on my website.

I figured I had to make my first April Fools Blog Post a good one

I do wonder what Google’s April Fools Day jokes will be about this year. They’ve had some pretty good ones in the past, like GoogleGulp and PigeonRank. Hopefully, this year they’ll have a classic.

Anyways, Happy April Fools Day everyone

So this is why I’ve decided to add a new “Battle of the Month” Category. Some of the battles will be serious, while others will be just absurd. For example, I’ll probably compare a politician or media icon to a piece of food, or even compare things like countries to digestive actions, etc. There’s so many possibilities with this new idea of mine.

I won’t complete my first installment until I find all the requirements I need. I’ll need to learn to configure the image options, find a way to post the things side by side, and I’ll probably search for some table plugin so I can post my facts and comparisons about each right next to each other.

I have plenty of ideas for this new category, just need to learn exactly how I’m going to want to do this.

Finally, a new currency classification for webmasters eager to get their web pages evaluated and marketed. This system is much simpler than Google’s Toolbar PR formula. It only contains four levels of Shock Ranking, here are the factors:

SR0 – This Page absolutely sucks! It probably wasn’t even created by a human. Or I just haven’t decided to calculate it yet. It could be either one.

SR1 – This page is OK. It may have some design flaws, or only a few paragraphs of great content.There are always ways you could improve your website.

SR2 – This is the a great page. It can’t get much better. I’m all for these types of styles, content, etc. These are some of the best pages available on the web today.

SR3 – The most certainly, positively highest rank any page can ever get. It has the same criteria as an SR2 page, but the biggest difference is that it contains a link pointing to lightningshock.com or one of it’s internal pages. Pages already pointing to this site are already qualified to be classified as an SR3 page, Congratulations!

That’s pretty much it. No silly weighted link calculations, no number of other links on the particular page, etc. ShockRank is an absolutely revolutionary idea.

Want to know what your page’s SR is? Comment below, and I’ll calculate your new SR for you (Only 3 URL’s max please, comments that do not follow these guidelines will not get evaluated.). And only one comment per year, I’m only one person here!