Why didn’t y’all tell me earlier things had gotten so bad?!

So Michael and I are setting up everything on the new host. (I do all the work and Michael sits beside me and reads instructions and keeps me from panicking. [Michelle: “ACK! I can’t READ! What do I DO?” Michael: “Click here. Click here. Type this. You’re done.” Michelle: “I’m DONE?! Don’t I have to do MORE?” Michael: (goes to get a beer)])

Everything seems to be working well. Feel free to poke around and look for broken stuff however.

Is this thing on?

YES! YES IT IS!

Let me know if anyone has any difficulties or speed issues. I still have to fix a couple other things, but it looks like the transfer went smoothly!

YEEE HAW!

Many of you have noted that my site has been slow, non-responsive, or down in recent months.

I contacted customer support and received the following response:

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One of the things I talk about when I teach web design is the main page for your site. If you have a website of any complexity, you want your main page/splash page to help people find what they’re looking for.

Weblogs are nice and all, but it’s very difficult to find your way around someone’s site if you find them through their weblog. Frankly, most people assume that’s all their is and look no further, but I think it’s interesting to see what else people have to say about themselves.

Since as I mentioned before, this weblog is not all there is to my website, my splash page has links to take you wherever else you’d like to go.

As with the book page, you can view the page with IE, but the menus don’t work IE (the worst thing is they almost work IE7, but not entirely, which is worse than not working at all). So you really want to use Firefox or Safari or anything else. Then you’ll get to see the menus, which make me very very happy.

I was pretty much elated for a week when I got the menus to work.

What if you’re using IE? The buttons take you to a main page, and from there you can access the pages available on the sub menu.

Then again, the layout of the page also makes me squeal with glee. (You did know I was easily amused, right?) I love the way the layout moves when the page is resized. I learned more about web design working on that page than on anything else, because that’s where I’d test things as I’d learn them.

But to give credit where credit is due, Michael created the random image and quote generators for me. I could do it myself now, but when I initially decided what I wanted, he wrote the code for me. So yay Michael!

You may notice that the splash page has a title that doesn’t make much sense. At the bottom there’s a link for “the little cyclops puppy” and you can see where the title came from.

It won’t make a lot of sense even then, but that’s what the title of my site has been since 1998, and it seems silly to change now.

You’ll also see links to the Cats page, where you can see pictures of my fine felines. There is also a link to the Quotes page, so if you want to read all my random quotes at once, plus some quotes that didn’t get put into the random quote generator, that’s the place to go.

The most popular page is the Morgantownies site. This is a page that was created by Gina, Erin, and me one day when we were really bored, and has snowballed out of control since then. Someone e-mailed me and told me I should enter everything into a database and make the page searchable and add photos…

No. It started as a lark. I’ll continue to maintain it, but I do NOT have the time to invest in creating a database and entering the data, and I definitely don’t have the time to make a searchable index, and adding photo–to do it right would chew up bandwidth like you wouldn’t believe. This is a site I pay for myself, and aside from the Amazon links, I don’t have advertising, and I plan to keep it that way.

Maybe one day when I’m rich and have oodles of free time. But not today, this week, or this year.

There are other pages as well, many of which have not been updated in a disgustingly long time. One day I may do something about that, but again, not today.

So there you go. My website is more than my weblog. Feel free to go explore and have fun. Or not. Either way is fine with me.

So yesterday I insisted that my website was about more than my weblog–and then proceeded to talk about little but the blog.

Let’s move on today.

A major part of this site is my book blog and book pages.

This started as a way for me to keep track of books I’d read–especially after I’d sold them back to the used bookstore–and to remember what happened in a book–especially a continuing series.

It reached it’s current incarnation several years ago, although the amount of change it’s gone through seems to say that things may again change in the future.

But maybe not. It’s a lot of work to modify those pages.

First thing I’ll note is that when you go to the genre pages, you won’t get the full deal if you’re using IE. I’ll leave the rant for later, but suffice to say, IE doesn’t bother to follow the rules every other browser follows, so some of the really cool stuff I’ve done doesn’t work in IE. This doesn’t mean you can’t view the pages–everything works fine, and I have a style sheet JUST for freaking IE that ignores the really cool stuff I did. It just means you don’t get the drop down menus, which are really the heart of all the work I did.

So if you go to, say, the Fantasy page or the Mystery page, the menu at the top of the page contains various drop down menus listing every author I’ve read and reviewed. Yes, there are a lot names there. That menu stays with you as you browse the book pages, so you can quickly jump to another author.

There is little in the world that made me as happy as getting that menu system to work right, and making it easy to update.

So what if you’re using IE? You just jump down the page and can peruse the authors from there. Clicking on an author name will take you to the page. Everything works, but it’s just not as cool and useful.

Also, if you click on a book title or image, it will take you to Amazon, and I’ll get pennies for the purchase, that will eventually become a gift certificate which will eventually become a free book.

There is also a link to my on-line book database. This was my project for learning php and MySQL, and I was rather pleased with the way it turned out I must say. Unfortunately, my web host made some server changes in the past months, and my admin pages stopped working, and I haven’t had the time to try and fix them. So the database is about a year out of date. But still, it’s nice for trying to remember who wrote a book. And one day (HA!) I’d like to enter character names.

We’ll see how that goes.

So there’s another section of my site you may never have known existed.

So those of you who don’t read this by RSS feed have seen how I’ve personalized Word Press, but believe it or not, there is more to this site than my blog.

Really!

I’ve maintained a personal website since 1998. Initially on Labyrinth, then on Earthlink, and then on various web hosting services. I started my weblog in February of 2002.

Why yes, I did all the coding my hand, thank you. All my web design was done in Arachnophilia, which was a code editor. So no permalinks or anything like that in the early years.

If you go back, what you’ll discover is that since I was writing for myself and sometimes erin (hi erin!), I wrote whatever came to mind. In essence it was to replace the paper journals that I was never capable of keeping up.

Obviously it worked in that I’ve been at this for over six years, but somewhere along the way I seem to have lost that sense of fearlessness about my writing I had then. For example, I can’t remember the last time I wrote about religion, and my posts about politics are few and far between.

Still, that’s a lot of words I’ve written.

I also have a section of writing in general, that contains links to short stories that came from my dreams (I have exceedingly weird dreams, and I sometimes used them as a writing exercise in coherency), and a couple of papers I wrote for school. Those were actually fun. There’s something about a good research paper…

Er… never mind.

OK. So, this somehow ended up being all about the blog anyway. Fine. Tomorrow then.

odd things
Yup. I got ’em .

computers internet blog
Yeah, that’s pretty much what you need to have a blog. Without either a computer or the internet, you won’t be getting much action

random is not random
That’s my theme. But I guess you were really looking for the fact that computers don’t really generate random numbers

gruntle
Yes, I do love the word gruntle. It’s even fun to say! Gruntle! Gruntle! Gruntle!

reasons why science is fun
When else do you get to blow things up or set them on fire in the name of education?

erudite latin sayings
As opposed to what?

hillbillies sports bras
I… Well… Damn. I have no idea.

odd things to find in a picture
Depends upon what the picture is supposed to be of in the first place, don’t you think?

kissing beautiful brusts
I’m sure that Steven Brust will be pleased.

alaska with beer
Jim or Tania – you wanna flip for this?

types of stressors
Work. Family. Does that about cover it?

Now that I got the sidebar widgets working, I’ve been playing with some of the different widgets available.

I really like the new tag cloud. It’s kinda fun.

Go vote for Shawn! I mean it! He’s beating Westley Crusher!

I come in and one of the first things I discover is that one of the two computers in my office I use for tutoring sessions is totally hosed.

And I have a tutoring session this morning.

Classes start today.

This means that traffic is going to be unbearable all week. I may skip our mid-week trip to the grocery store on Wednesday/Thursday if things are still bad by then.

I’m going to spend most of the week sitting and the front desk, not only because we have two brand-new GAs, and not only because none of the GAs have worked during a fall semester start, but because we’re probably going to be extremely busy, and the faster we can help people and get them logged in, the better.

The weekend was pleasant. My aunt, uncle, and cousins came by Saturday afternoon to visit with my grandmother. That’s always fun, if a little crazy.

Oh, I printed the stills I took from the Flip. I printed two stills on a single sheet 4×6 photo paper, and they looked fantastic. I don’t think I could have printed them much larger, but they looked surprisingly good. (I have one copy to my grandmother, and mailed another copy to my cousin’s grandfather.)

Which reminds me, I love my new printer. I printed out some flower pictures to send to Michael’s grandmother, and I couldn’t tell them came from a printer. (Usually you can look at a picture and tell it was printed; these are really good pictures.)

Otherwise, don’t expect much this week. I’m writing several posts early (right now is actually Sunday night, but this will be posted Tuesday morning). But I expect to be busy.

Which means I’ll spend a long time at the front desk surfing the web, probably.

So, I had $50 in Amazon Reward Certificates, so I decided to order a Flip.

I’m shocked at how easy it is to used, and pleased with the quality I’ve gotten–just on the first day of playing with it.

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I didn’t get 18k steps today because I was running all over creation at work.

Nope, today I got the upper body workout, as I took the break before classes start to organize and rearrange our stock room. (My boss has been promising to do this for three weeks, but hasn’t had the time. I decided to take a GA and get it done before break is over.)

We moved cases of paper (around 20) from one room to another and stacked them about six high against the wall, moved about 20 boxes of toner (much lighter!) from one room to another, moved metal cabinets around, piled (insanely heavy and awkward to move) keyboard trays atop an empty cabinet, and hauled about 15 computers and monitors from one room to another.

If nothing else, my job has plenty of variety to keep my healthy. (Tomorrow’s goal? Sitting at my desk with my feet up.)