This is my blog. It is substantially prettier than the previous version. It is privately hosted, so I can play around with stuff. I love to tinker.

I made it for my benefit really, since I do love to ramble on about EVE stuff. Especially old EVE stuff. If they ever added a rocking chair in Incarna, I’d be buying one in a heartbeat and yelling at kids to get off my space-lawn, whatever one of those might be…

Generally, I post things that interest me. If they happen to interest you as well, that’s great! I’ve left comments open so people can swear at me for being wrong or send me e-cookies; whichever seems more appropriate. If I am wrong though, do point it out. I have a large collection of chatlogs archived, but my memory is far from infallible. I’ll make every effort to correct mistakes if any get spotted by the eagle-eyed, or the ancient. As a sidenote, I have been called up on this before, so it does happen.

I currently only intend to post from the two characters I have that I consider my ‘mains’. These are Kalahari Wayrest and Adrielle Firewalker. Both of these have been going since 2003, so I’ve been around a while. I quit once, but it only lasted a month. I’m hopelessly addicted to internet spaceships and their serious business-ness.

The Blog

The blog itself is powered by WordPress, and it’s hosted in the UK by a company called Heart Internet.

I also recently purchased two additional domains to forward to this one. They are not particularly hard to guess, but I mostly got them as an analytical experiment.

Version 1 – Monochrome

It started off with a default theme, and shortly after I moved it to my own domain, I used a modified version of the Monochrome theme from mono-lab. At this point in time, I also made use of some icons from the freeware Feedicons 2 pack.

Version 2 – Cryptic

After this, I decided to go for something a bit more snazzy. I bought a theme from some site or other called crypticwest, because I was lazy and didn’t want to do the bulk of the layout and CSS myself.

Version 2

Version 2 of Chocolate Heaven

I also went ahead and adapted the theme a bit to make use of some nifty character commissions from the wonderful Sienna. These were made specifically for the purpose of going on this website. I may make the larger resolution images available for download at some point, if anyone is interested in cool EVE ‘fan art’.

Version 3 – Sexy Boots

Fast forward eighteen months, and I was getting kind of frustrated with the limitations of someone else’s theme; even if I had quite heavily modified it to suit my needs.

I began working on an alternative, and what you see here now is the third major revision of that process. I didn’t have enough of a coherent plan for the direction of the content of the site, so the specifications for the design changed quite a lot as time went on. This version features two more commissioned artwork pieces – again from Sienna – which adorn each side of the website, if you are fortunate enough to have a largish resolution. If not, then I guess you’re out of luck.

The major downfall of the previous version was poor use of space – everything got bunched up just so you could see the characters. This time its more focused on the content, and the characters are a nice extra if you have the screen space to spare.

version 3

Version 3 of Chocolate Heaven

I’ve made extensive use of Twitter’s Bootstrap (which if you make websites, you should really look into – it’s lovely), and the icons I’ve used in this version are also from le Bootstrap, and are provided by Glyphicons.

Legal

It goes without saying – but I will anyway – that this slice of Chocolate Heaven also incorporates images and potentially text from the online world of Eve Online, which is Copyright CCP Games. I have a page set up specifically for legal stuffs, which you can read here.

The Plugins

The plugins used on this blog are copyright their respective owners. For anyone interested, they are as follows (at the time of writing):

  • Akismet – Anti-spam plugin
  • Better Tag Cloud – I did away with the Flash one. It looked nice, but it was more distracting from the content than it was entertaining to see and use.
  • FD Footnotes – Bibliographic stuff. Very handy for when I start getting back into the swing of history posts.
  • Post-Plugin Library – As it says on the tin, it does bugger-all on its own, but its a requirement for…
  • Similar Posts – Because sometimes its nice to see what a stupid computer thinks is relevant to your interests. I lie; its actually not too bad!
  • Ultimate Google Analytics – I like numbers and statistics. I am also lazy and don’t want to have to log in to see Analytics stuff, so this allows me to see at a glance what is going on from the admin panel instead!
  • WordPress Twitter Bootstrap CSS – Bit of a mouthful, but it allows me to use shortcodes for making fancy cool stuff within my posts without having to write a load of stuff in the HTML view.
  • wp-Typography – Hyphenation and other fun stuff that just makes the site a more pleasant reading experience.

For anyone taking note, these have changed quite extensively over time. I haven’t bothered documenting the ones I’ve removed over the various versions of the site, so I guess you’ll never know!