dianaschnuth

Just for shits and giggles, I signed up on all those blogariffic sites out there: blo.gs, weblogs.com, BlogStreet, Blogrolling, syndic8.com, and updated my Technorati profile. I also set MT to accept trackback pings and to ping a few of the sites I signed up on, to let them know I updated. So, to anyone who finds my humble site or feed through one of those sites, welcome. I’m not always terribly interesting… but neither are the other friends and strangers whose blogs I frequent myself, so I’m in good company.

I’m not particularly motivated to do anything this evening. Work really drained me today. The stress I felt today was reminiscent of my days back in Lockbox:

24 September 2002: Just Another Day…

Hey, for once I worked an 8-hour day! Yeah, we were doing so well that we actually took a one-hour lunch and everything. Just for reference, yesterday I worked a 14-hour day. Seriously. My co-worker and almost-supervisor, Loni, worked an hour and a half more than me, since she came in at 6am. Damn, that sucked. Makes the normal 8-hour day seem like a luxury instead of a burden.

Being one of three people manning the Loan Corrections Team Line (aka ‘working the phones’) wasn’t horrible, although I had twice as many calls as usual. And doing loan changes wasn’t all that bad, either, although I had several requests that I had to call people about and wait around for answers. But all those things together made for one damn hectic day. I felt like I was going in six different directions all day—I’d hang up the phone from one call, go to start a loan change, get another call, have to do research for that call, finally get back to that loan change I’d started, then get another call, then finally finish that first loan change, then have to call someone about a detail of the next loan change… Yeesh. My desk has at this moment about seven different stacks of paper of varying heights and degrees of importance.

That really sucked away any sort of energy, creative or otherwise, that I might have had in reserve for my Me Time this evening.

So… that’s today.

Remind me: why did I syndicate this again?

Well, everything seems to have gone smoothly with the MT upgrade. I tried putzing with the “dynamic page generation,” but all it seemed to do was b0rk my one category page (although it did reduce the rebuild time). So, I’m not using the dynamic page generation yet… not until I do a little more research and find out what the big hype is all about.

I do know that there’s a lot about this whole thing that I haven’t been utilizing to its fullest extent, even with the old version of MT. For instance, I’d wanted to include a different sidebar (see right) with each category index page—say, photography links for my Photography category, and low-carb links for my Atkins category, and links to concert tours and reviews and such for my Reviews category. It seems that, while MT still doesn’t support what I’d wanted to do, there is a plug-in that can do this for me. So, I’ll probably mess with that sometime tomorrow.

There’s plenty of other blog things for me to research in the future, too, like pinging for trackbacks and such. I just can’t think of any mainstream blog tracker thingy that would give a shit if little ol’ me had an update. :-/ Do people really just surf off of places like blo.gs or weblogs.com?

Since I switched to PHP, and deleted all my HTML-based individual archives, I’ve also been having some visitors get 404 Not Found messages. D’oh! So, I need to go into my HostRocket Control Panel and make a custom 404 Error page saying to try changing the .htm to a .php to view the page. Awfully ghetto of me, but… *shrug*

Anyway, fun times ahead. Prepare to see more happy categorized entries from Yours Truly. @whee!

Well, how about that? I managed to whip together a Thanksgiving theme just in time. The most time-consuming part was locating appropriate images online for the background. Props go out to About.com for the pumpkins and the gourd, and to the Google Image Search for finding me the other gourd image.

In other site-related news, I imported entries from April 2004 last night. Now you can read about such exciting ventures as… well… us buying home improvement supplies from Home Depot? My review of Kill Bill Volume 2? Some random couple “parking” on my street? Yeah. Hit the archives for more exciting archived goodness.

I’m also contemplating upgrading to Movable Type 3.1 sometime in the near future, mainly to see what kind of category support it has. (I’ve been assigning categories to all of my entries, but have only been actively using the photography category.) So, if the site goes all wonky sometime in the next few days, you’ll know why.

Let’s hear it for four-day weekends. Word.

Did I happen to mention that, with my all-CSS layout, a minor full-site redesign (color changes, slight positional tweaking) would take considerably less time?

How about one evening?

Everything looks the same right now, but you will all get a Happy Hannukah surprise in a couple few weeks. (Hannukah, Chanukkah, however you Romanize it… I’m taking my spelling straight from the Jew myself.)

I’m also planning a Christmas theme, maybe a Yule theme before that (Dec 21), and afterward… Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s, Independence Day, blah blah blah. And, in case you were wondering how I’m managing all this (which I’m sure you were), I’m writing new stylesheets for each holiday theme, then writing some PHP code to plug in the right stylesheet on the right date. There’s only a few things—like those fancy horizontal rules—that I’ll still have to change out manually, if I get a bug up my ass about it.

And, of course, I’ll include posts giving the history and significance of the holiday and of the symbolism I’ve incorporated into my design. I’m also going to make a valiant attempt to actually do some real research into each holiday for which I design, and not offend anyone by my ignorance. For example, for my Hannukah theme, I wanted to use a real Hannukah quotable in the masthead—but I didn’t want to use the name of God, 1.) because Jews don’t write the Name of God, and 2.) because I’m agnostic-bordering-on-atheist myself, and don’t want to give prospective visitors the wrong idea (that is, that I’m proselytizing). So, I did a decent amount of researching and looking around online, and ended up quoting only part of the prayer said after the candles of the menorah (hannukia, whatever) are lit.

Not that Sheryl would be offended if I put every single Name of God I could find up on my webpage. Elohim! ELOHIM! (Mormons call Him that too, by the way. We—well, they, I guess—also know the Four-Letter Name, and also don’t write or pronounce it.)

You’ll all get a Diana-style crash course in Hannukah and Judaism (sp?) in another few weeks, complete with quotables from the inimitable Sheryl and many lovely links.

I like my new Hannukah theme better than this yellowy-green thing I’ve got now. I can’t wait to switch it out…!

I’ve got my Backlog going on, but it’s not very pretty yet. I can’t figure out how to change the separator from a dash to a colon, like in the current tune. And, even so, it’s still pretty long for my sidebar width. I may see if there’s some way I can make it only read the title, then link to Amazon for the artist. That would be sweet.

Er, wait. I figured it out. Let’s hear it for figuring out how to cut-and-paste the correct lines of code, and to change them appropriately. Now I just have to see if I can make it remember and display my backlog while I’m not listening to WinAmp.

I kind of wanted to play with this more, but I want to check out the Nightline about the Clinton Presidential Library. Sounds interesting.

Edit, 11:30pm: I just did something pretty damn cool, IMHO. No, I didn’t manage to make my web page remember my backlog after I quit WinAmp—that would involve more programming than I know or care to get into at this particular point in time, as I think I’d have to export the songs to a file or database.

No, I made it so that my backlog 1.) doesn’t show blank lines when I haven’t played five songs yet, and b.) isn’t quite as ugly and wrapped around funny. Next I’m on, mouse over one of the song titles in my backlog. It should pop up with “search for U2 on Amazon,” assuming it was U2 I was listening to, and the link searches for the artist on Amazon. w00t!

Maybe I *should* try studying Computer Science sometime, maybe get a certificate like Amy… I’m really getting off on this coding thing. I’d forgotten that a.) I know enough logic to do basic programming, and b.) I enjoy it.