meta

A couple of meta things:

• Woo me! I have entries for over half the days of the month this month (ok, so just barely, and just by one, but still!). This is even after my tiff with the blog for eating an entry and my spiteful week of non-posting, so I’m quite proud. Granted, the dream journal really pads those numbers out a lot, but there’s some meat to be found even excluding that.
  
• As of last week, I’m now pinging weblogs.com whenever I post a new entry. I don’t see that it has generated extra hits, but it’s kind of cool anyways. Feels like an announcement : hey, new stuff! It works about half the time, though, sometimes giving me a freaky error that may have more to do with them being overburdened than with issues on my end. I know I said I wouldn’t do this until I had finished posting to the past, but I’ve kind of dropped the ball on that. I haven’t posted any of the older entries since March, so I figure it’s ok to go ahead with the weblogs ping.
  
• No one ever asked to be notified on new entries, so instead I’m using that feature to notify ME of when new comments show up. Because people can comment on any entry, no matter how old, I was sometimes not seeing the comments for ages and ages, and the software doesn’t include and easy way for me to browse the latest comments (though I wish it did) so I’ll be glad to get a heads up when people leave comments. However, I’m not sure it’s working, as I think I set it up before I asked for comments on the American Apology t-shirt and didn’t get emails about that, but I could just be misremembering.
  
• I still have plans of things I’d like to add to the site. I have some leftover luscious graphics from Wyldkyss that I haven’t yet added to the site, and of course I’d like to reconstruct my list of links, as right now I just have the default list that comes with nucleus over on the left: daypop, weblogs and nucleus. I also haven’t completely finished looking at the list of add-ons for the software I’m using. The calendar (one of the add-ons I managed to work in so far) is fantastic, as it gives me a glanceable sense of how much (or little) I’m writing in the current month. It also encourages me, as seeing the days without links makes me more aware of when I neglect the blog. I think I’d like to fiddle with the calendar some and include it on some of the other pages, but I haven’t made up my mind about that. At any rate, plenty of ambitious plans in the works. If anyone has some spare time to donate to my cause, I’d be most grateful.
  

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I just wrote an extremely long rant and my blog ate it. I’m very, very upset. I’m only writing this now to see if the thing is postable to. Oh, and for sympathy.

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Fixes and tweaks galore made on Wednesday. Screen width is set at 800, apologies to anyone viewing 640 x 480. The right bar no longer floats, so if you’re in mad resolution I imagine there’s lots of space out to the right of the pictures. Consider it a peaceful sea of emptiness or something. I’ve modified the css so that it’s hopefully less broken in IE. I also changed around some of the font sizes in the different sections, hopefully increasing legibility. I’ve also tweaked the comment section so the comments are somewhat more visible. All of these minor changes took an absurdly long time, and I expect not to be changing much about the overall look for a good long time. Focus now switches to content. I want to add my old link list, finish the loading of the older entries and suchlike.

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So I had wanted to get an entry in every day, but yesterday I was frazzled, uninspired and couldn’t find my list of things to write about. Also yesterday I had a great story idea that I didn’t write down and now is gone forever. On the plus side, the house is still sold and we now have a bank account with a bank I don’t hate. Not only that, but my power adapter came from Apple and it works and now I have my iBook working again and everything is well.

I have the ability with this software to ping weblogs.com every time I update. I’m trying to decide whether I want to do that or not. I’m also trying to decide whether I want to keep the link to weblogs.com under the links category. All it does if I activate it is add me to the list of recent updates. I don’t think anyone actually surfs weblogs.com to try and find blogs although I’ve been doing exactly that some in the past couple of weeks, studying layouts and so forth and getting ideas for my own space. I’m always my own counterexample, it seems. Opinions? I also have the ability to notify people on updates of the site. This is something people have actually asked me for and I now have it. If you want to be notified when I submit new entries let me know and I’ll add you to the list. Unless you tell me otherwise, I’ll add the address you write me from as the notification address. I won’t start this up until I’m done posting the backlog, by the way, so it may be a couple of weeks or so.

Still left to do on the site:

• Combine the two CSS files into one. The CSS is still not working properly in IE on mac but maybe combining them will fix this.
  
• Fiddle with CSS until : there’s no across scroll at the bottom of the browser and the line that breaks the header from the content doesn’t go through the middle of the title on IE and nothing that currently works is broken.
  
• Fiddle with the right hand table until the graphics align properly in IE
  
• Finish skin editing for other views (archives, items, etc.)
  
• Make the comments be boxed out and pretty
  
• Make the contents text smaller
  
• Add toadstools
  
• Add links and site navigation stuff
  
• Add bar image for breaks
  
• See if I want to add any more plugins
  
• Update currents content and add titles to different sections
  
• The things I’ve forgotten to list go here
  
• Fiddle with the calendar till it works the way I think it should
  

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I’m working feverishly on getting the blog in tip top shape. You can now see the gorgeous graphic that Wyldkyss designed and drew for me. I think it’s fabulous. If you think so too, write her and tell her so.

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Well, I’ve done some work on the calendar. I’m not sure whether it’s too small to be useful or not. We’ll see. I also changed the number of entries showing on one page to 6. The default was 15, but the standard length of my entries made that way too many. I’m not convinced that 6 is not too few, but again, I suppose we’ll see. Entries since I got the blogging software have been consistently shorter.

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I decided not to eliminate the title, but to only post an entry with a title if I feel moved to do so. Most entries will undoubtedly lack titles.

Yesterday was mad hectic, and shortly after I posted that everything about the house sale was going well it started, predictably, to go horribly awry. Just thinking about it makes me all tense and stressed and angry, so I’m not going to go into details at the moment, but suffice it to say that I find it almost preferable to not sell the house at this point and just walk away from the whole thing.

I added the calendar plugin at some point last week and forgot to mention it. I’m happy with it and want it, but I’m having difficulty situating it in a way that pleases me. I suppose that ideally it would hang out on the left with the other navigational items, but it’s far larger than those and I’m not sure I can get it down to a manageable size. Expect much fiddling and moving around of the calendar in the near future. Also expect some fiddling around with the comments, to better set them apart, perhaps add the date on which they were posted and limit the number that are displayed on the front page. Still to do : fixes for some of the displays (most notably the item display) that still seem to break the css and shove the right panel with the pics to the bottom.

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OK, bit by bit, the new blog is coming together. Comments are enabled and working, and most of the links on the left should work too. There’s still some gropen things and feel free to leave me a comment about anything abnormal you find, just in case it’s something not already on my “to fix” list. Otherwise, I’m taking a break from fiddling with the site to load old diary entries. You know what’s strange? taking text files named totally random things like tattomania.txt or 030303.txt and trying to find meaningful “titles” for them as blog entries. Maybe I should get rid of the title altogether. After all, I might not be able to come up with scintillating enough titles and feel all this pressure to be cool like all the other bloggers and fail miserably and get writer’s block.

Or something.

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