Doing a little house cleaning. I moved from my old web host to DreamHost. They are less gross politically. And I’m tired of paying a fortune for and dealing with errors I can’t solve. I’ll be attempting to clean up my old site images in the next few weeks and to rethink what I want to make this site going forward.
I did a design theme update to the site, so it looks a bit different these days. There will be some more tweaks as I customize the theme a bit more, but it looks a lot more simple than it did.
I have also gone through the entire site and updated all of the broken links to either go the correct places or be unlinked if there were no places to update. 8,655 links were fixed. I am truly excited about this. Here’s hoping that will reduce the amount of GPU overage charges I get for the site.
I’ve been doing a lot of housecleaning, site-wise over the past several weeks. I’m in the process of converting over some of my older blog sites to wordpress, shuttering others, and putting up fresh new “coming eventually” pages at all of the URLs I own. I’ve been playing with Foundation by Zurb as a CSS framework, in preparation for working on a portfolio of my design work.
Electrasteph.com has fresh new face. It’s pretty bare bones and needs a little more style, but for now it looks better. I’ve never used it for much except listing out the various sites I own.
I’m struggling with making my fortune cookie site do what I want. I’d like to be more than a blog site, but the template I’ve chosen seems to want to fight with me. I’ll get it done eventually.
Hey, I finally got my site all moved over to my host and just as importantly, to my new content management system. The design is quite different, and not yet mine. I’ve done some customization of the theme, but I have a lot more work planned on that end. And there’s a lot of clean up of old posts to be done. But the worst of the move is over and I can ease into the rest as time goes by.
And even more important – I can post more often and the technical workings of the site are much more efficient and easy to update. I’m really excited about what I can do now.
It was worth the wait.
Pardon the dust, please; I’m moving this site out of Movable Type and into Word Press, and from an old-school host to Media Temple. I took the week off to make this move because I have to configure Word Press and get plugins in place, and I have over 6,000 posts and hundreds of images to import, relink and potentially update.
The site will also sport a new design; I’m using a theme that is built using responsive design framework so the site will be optimized for mobile devices, and which is also customizable so I can put my design on that framework.
Things will be a bit quiet around here until I get things up to speed, but they’ve been pretty quiet anyway since I’ve struggled with the site in the old content management system and at the old site host. Once I get things squared away, expect posting to pick up some speed.
I have an rss feed of my site log so I can see the activity people are doing on my site, and it sometimes shows some strange search terms people run through site’s search function. Sometimes it’s obvious people have confused my site with google (although I can’t imagine why) and sometimes it’s just plain odd. Here are some from the last month:
iknoles – no clue what this is supposed to be.
dubai news
Kiran Times
melissa
why is the ocean blue
define: Fanny
facts about underarmour – I’m afraid to google that.
Abdul Hakim-Shabazz – I haven’t blogged about that guy in a while, but he runs an ego search on my site regularly. Don’t work, Abdul, I still think you’re a dickhead, but you’re just not important enough to write about except to make fun of your ego-searching
I figured out my IE 7 display issues finally. Sorry for the delay – normally I don’t let problems like that linger, but I was having trouble finding a free hour to troubleshoot. Thanks to Wil for helping me pinpoint the problems.
I’ve been dissatisfied with the navigation methods here on my site for a long time – I was very frustrated by the long, unwieldy category list from the sidebar – I’ve always organized by category, but the display of that navigation sucked, because it was hard to tell that there were categories and sub-categories, and the list was way long. The sidebar looked cluttered, and in general I didn’t feel like writing because I hated the way my site looked.
I knew the solution was to approach it differently; I needed a drop-down, fly-out menu bar along the top of the site. But I was afraid to tackle the task because tangling with the lack of support materials for Movable Type has been problematic in the past. (see the related categories at the bottom of this post.)
But I spent a bit of time with this post: “Creating Drop-Down Navigation with Movable Type” and worked it out. I knew I didn’t want to use the MooTools solution he offered, so I adapted his work and integrated it with this “Simple jQuery Dropdowns” solution, because I knew I want to use jQuery for some other rich behaviors on the site in the future.
Now the categories make more sense because you can see sub-topics and sub-sub topics. And it’s all neatly folded up along the top of the site. I had some testing problems in IE7 – dunno if I cleared them up completely yet or not. I may need to do some fixing there still.
Because it’s cleaner and neater, I didn’t mind adding some categories that I needed; stuff I’ve been writing/posting links about like feminist issues and photography, and yes, your favorite and mine — knitting. I still need to step back through old blog posts and move them to the appropriate categories, but going forward, things will land in their own spots.
And the change in categories helps me re-think and get excited about things that I used to write about that have fallen by the wayside.
The removal of that long category list down the side means I had a lot more room in the sidebar and you can see items there much better. Many of the pages aren’t as long now, and all of them can breathe more. I rearranged my ads a bit because those help pay for the site.
So I’m feeling fresh and clean and exciting, like a feminine hygiene ad. I may go walk on the beach. While knitting. And then I’ll tell you all about it.
Way back in the dark ages when I started this site, I didn’t manage to keep track of the date. It was before blogger software, and before it was even affordable to own a domain name for a personal site (it cost in the $200 range to purchase one). I believe – but am not entirely sure – that I put my first pages up in November of 1994. My “site” was hosted at my local ISP. I had the pages of jokes up, and an article I’d written on the National Women’s Music Festival (Cringeworthy! Don’t read it!), and various news stories I’d cribbed from around the internet. And a bunch of “essays” on love and life, some of which aren’t up anymore because I’m embarrassed at how ridiculous they sounded upon reading them later. One of my first site iterations has a treasure map image map on the front page, and all the sections of content were items on the map. It was deeply cheesy and I’ll have to dig it out, because it was hilarious.
The consequence of all of this is that I’ve never had a “blogiversary” date to celebrate like other sites. So I’m making one up now. November has just past; this site is at least 14 years old. Woo ha. Party hats for all.
I haven’t written much lately; summer is always hectic, and we’ve got lots of outstanding projects.
The rental house is again empty, and we have again have lots of repairs from tenant neglect and abuse of the property. We’re working on those and hope to have a property manager so we won’t have to deal with this sort of thing for months on end every freaking year. It amazes me how little people care for where they live if they don’t own it. It’s really sad, and frustrating for us, since we have to put time into it when there’s so much to do at our house, too.
We’re also working on lots of stuff around our house. We’ve made some progress here and there getting stuff in shape and clutter-busting. The guest room has been a particularly knotty problem for us. It turned into the catch-all room when we were moving in and didn’t know exactly what to do with stuff, and consequently, we have boxes and boxes that need to be sorted — all piled up in front of the Murphy bed cabinet. At one time or another, one of us would wander into the room and attempt to figure out how to put stuff away, get overwhelmed, and scurry out again.
So we hired an organization guru to help us. So far, she’s spent 2 hours with us in the room, working on sorting out boxes and choosing what stays, what gets trashed, and what goes to goodwill. Having someone other than yourself ask you questions about your stuff is REALLY helpful in focusing your thinking. She doesn’t have all the hang-ups and blinders, so she can ask what the item really means to you. And she can keep your attention on small chunks of the organizing so that you don’t get overwhelmed by the full volume of stuff. We got so much done in the first two hours that I was excited for days afterward. We can see large sections of the floor! The Murphy bed is within reach! We can have people stay over soon! Maybe! I’m not sure Stephanie was equally thrilled, which worries me.
Last night I went through and reorganized much of our Christmas decor in the basement. Inside, we’re only decorating modestly and putting up the small tree to keep things simple. We plan on decorating the porch with lights for the first time (we had an outlet installed this summer) so I have to work out a lighting scheme. Last night we also went through all the strands of lights we have available and tested and fixed many of them. I really enjoy that. I kinda wish we had an art project using lights.
I’m looking forward to Christmas, although it’s hectic at work and we’re already shaping up to have too many parties to attend. But it is at least some respite from the down-in-the-dumps feelings I get every year when there’s no sun and it’s too cold. I really would just like to curl up at home and stay there and never venture out into the weather. The news and worrying about the economy and financial considerations of loved ones also has given me the blues in a serious way; hence the lack of real writing here.
There’s so much that seems out of my control that I feel helpless a lot of the time, and angry, too.
After I pretty much got everything in place, Movable Type comes out with a plugin and set of sandbox templates — similar to what WordPress has — that allows you to install a really basic default set of templates and then create your own design on top of the template elements — similar to what I was wishing for in this post the other day.
That’s actually really funny. I’m not going to rework everything yet again right now, but good that they’ve done one. I’ll definitely go that route in the future when undertaking a redesign. And refining all my content at this point will help immensely with future design undertakings.