I will be upgrading to this new version Sunday night.

However, this cycle the Navy changed something. The Navy sort of “rearranged” the way that they score the final multiple. They chopped the legs out from underneath sailors with average evaluations and mediocre test scores. Luckily for me, I’m in neither category. I have a fairly high eval score and I do way better than average on the test. Basically, the change helped me, so why does this bother me? I’m going to assume if you’ve read this far, you are familiar (at least a little bit) with the Navy advancement system.

Without the change, and all things remaining the same, I needed 14 points to get advanced to 1st based on the previous test 6 months ago. The final multiple to get advanced was 218 and my final multiple was 204. Because of my test score and my eval average, I gained 6 points in PNA. I also gained 2 points from a Good Conduct Medal, 3 points from a bump in eval average, and 1 point time in rate for a grand total of 12 points. That means, all I have to do is score 2 points higher on the test and I get advanced.

Now, here comes the change. I get the 6 PNA points, 2 from the GCM, and 1 from time in rate but the new advancement scoring gives me 6 points for a grand total of 15 extra points. I should be happy right? Well, actually, I’m a bit skeptical. When the Navy does a big shake up like this, the numbers get all out of whack. That final multiple of 218 could easily shoot up to a 228 or even higher. I’m not saying it’s going to, I’m just saying that I like to be in control of my destiny and at least feel like I have a little control of my future income.

After all, that’s why I even write on this blog. It helps me to talk about the things going on in my life and allows users to interact with me and opens up the possibility of future connections (like Doc) and the guarantee that I can keep up with old friends, like Casey Eaves (Cheeves), that are stationed overseas.

This brings me to my next thought, comment spam. These spammers are getting better and better every day. I recently moved to a dedicated server and the pending DNS move caused a few comments to be lost. Luckily for me, most of these were spam. When the DNS finally did propagate, I found 119 comments and most of them appeared to be legitimate. I decided to spot check one of them to see what the commentor was saying and low and behold, it was some random quote from John Paul Jones that had nothing to do with wordpress plugins or php. All they were doing was trying to gain 1 single link back to their black hat site, at the expense of my site. It’s bad enough this was the worst server move in the history of server moves.

Hey, at least they got the Navy part right, though.

• Google Sitemap Generator - This plugin creates a sitemap for google sitemaps. It’s an xml-sitemap and is updated every time you make a new post or write a new page. Some useful features include: inclusion of non-wordpress pages into sitemap, ability to change frequencies and priorities of pages/posts in your sitemap, and the ability to exclude/include category pages and comments. Another useful feature is that the plugin automatically pings google to let it’s spider know that you’ve updated your sitemap. Great Plugin!
• Related Posts - This is another must have plugin for getting your blog spidered properly. This plugin fetches articles based on keyword overlaps, and displays them as an unordered list. According to it’s homepage, posts with more keyword matches to the current post are displayed first. This plugin is also useful for gaining higher ranking in the serps because related pages tend to pass higher ranking than unrelated pages. For example, if you ran a poker site, a link from another poker site would weigh heavier than a link from say, a children’s site.
• Head META Description - A brilliant plugin from Guff, head meta description uses the excerpt data from wordpress posts and automatically creates a meta description for that post. Some argue that the search engines rarely pay attention to the meta tags but I believe it’s just part of good “webmastering”. Different Meta tags show each page is different and I have noticed that some search engines use the meta description as the description in it’s results. Either way, it’s just the right thing to do and this plugin makes it very easy.
• The Excerpt Reloaded - This is another plugin by guff and it’s one of the best plugins I’ve seen. It allows for greater flexibility in using the the_excerpt() tag within wordpress. With this plugin, you can include/exclude html within your post excerpts as well as change the length, and many other features.

GearAdrift was originally designed using Wordpress blogging software, but due to my lack of knowledge (at the time) of php and theming, I was quickly overwhelmed in trying to create a custom theme and integrate the old forum. I recluctantly converted the site over to Joomla and had a custom theme designed that worked great in the beginning.

I’ve come to realize that this was a mistake. Joomla is a great CMS for beginners but is very limited in it’s true functionality. I won’t get into the main problems here but it involves the ease of code manipulation versus Wordpress. Basically, I’ve come to realize that there is nothing that can be done with Joomla that can not be done with Wordpress (and a little scripting).

I do want to give a shout out to Chris at rangit.com for this very helpful post on migrating Joomla to Wordpress.