dianaschnuth

For the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Why must I have these fantastic ideas like, Let’s put the menu for my portfolio site in the bottom left corner! That way, I won’t be able to use the standard nested unordered list to stylize my menu, and I’ll have to come up with some effed up way to rig it! Yeah, that sounds like fun!

I feel like the answer is obvious, yet it eludes me. I’m sure that a.) it’s just a little late at night for actual mental activity to be successful, and b.) upon a proper Googling later, the answer will present itself.

In the meantime, anyone who’d care to school me on how daft I’m being right now is welcome to take a gander at my portfolio in progress. I just want the goddamn submenus to stay visible. *sigh*

It’s a very basic problem. I just need more sleep to conquer it.

“Task” for potential employer: done.
Time to complete: 10.5 hours.

I’ve never coded someone else’s website layout before. I liked it. Could be that my calling is strictly as a web developer, not a designer. That, plus I’m a grammar nazi. When I’m plugging in content, I *have* to correct comma splices and misspellings. Web copy editor, anyone?

Now, it’s time to focus on following up with other companies to whom I’ve submitted a resume online. I am armed with legal-size paper and a full clip of determination.

I have three months to land a job in my field. Granted, if I don’t, I get to take home a decent chunk of severance pay… but it’s not worth it to waste job-hunting time and possibly miss the job for me, just to stick around and get my severance. You know?

Finished the initial roll of film in the Brownie Starmite. Today was appropriately sunshiny, so I took identical photos to yesterday’s overcast ones, plus some others to pad out the roll. Wrote a check to Dwayne’s Photo for $14, packed up the film, and will be shipping it off tomorrow morning. I expect to have twelve 4″ x 4″ prints in my hot little hands by May 1st.

Put away the mess of clothes on the floor by the bed. Went into the small bedroom and arranged all of our board games on a small plastic shelving unit in the closet. (Damn, we have a lot of board games. Trivial Pursuit especially.) Moved my empty steamer trunk from the small bedroom to beside my nightstand. Sometime in the near future, I’ll be going through the linen closet and moving blankets into the trunk to make room for the new sheets I intend to purchase.

Submitted the new freelance site to Google for spidering and indexing. I’m planning to use a Google search for the site search, so a good spidering by Google would be a definite plus. Still have a lot to do… I’m not going to end up getting everything done this week that I told them I would. I knew I was giving myself a mighty tall order, what with the laundry list of stuff I had yet to do. Not to worry. It’ll get done well before the Japan trip. Hopefully by the end of April, if not sooner.

Paid my credit card bills. A simple task, but still one that makes me feel… satisfied? Relieved? Accomplished? Meh. It’s done, anyway.

Paying bills is going to get more interesting in July, when Sky changes over to Huntington’s payroll system. Bi-weekly instead of semi-monthly. This will take some getting used to, after being paid on the 15th and the last day of the month for the past 4½ years.

Stayed up a little too late last night after getting home from Easter festivities in Cleveland. Woke up this morning, way late and bleary-eyed, and decided to use one of my personal days. After all, I need to get my freelance project done this week, and there are a few important parts that aren’t done yet. So, I stayed home, slept in a little, and worked for about four hours total on that.

I’m realizing that creating my own content management system (CMS) from a flat-file database is a little more challenging than I’d thought it would be. I thought it would be ridiculously simple, but it’s really not. I’d really rather use SQL, but enabling SQL on my client’s webhosting would cost them extra from their webhost. I’m highly tempted to just tell my client to edit the file themselves as needed, and upload it via FTP… but I know I should really afford them a way to edit their news and such in the browser itself.

I spent long enough figuring out how to check a username and password against a flat-file db, and remembering how to get PHP to remember that the user has logged in, via session variables. I finally had some ideas about how to edit and delete records after being flummoxed for quite some time… but I got sidetracked by Japan trip stuff, and never got back to coding, and now my brain’s winding down enough that I’m not going to attempt it now. Maybe tomorrow after work. I’m thinking about feeding the db into an array to display it, then editing the array and spitting the whole array back out into a new file, overwriting the old. Should work, right…?

Back to work tomorrow. Meh. I’m looking forward to finishing this freelance job so I can a.) invoice the client, and b.) finish up my resume and portfolio redux in preparation for the pre-Japan job-hunting blitz.

For anyone who’s been interested in what my freelance gig is and how it’s turning out, I thought I’d share with you the HTML mock-up I’ve created for my client. They chose this design out of over half a dozen Photoshop composites, and I spent this week creating a stylesheet that I can plug their content into. After I do that, there will be some content-management issues to tackle and some bells and whistles to add.

So, there you have it: the midpoint of my freelance project. I think it’s some of my better work, IMHO.