Category: Webby Admin

Here’s the Thing

Some time ago, I hit the point where I just don’t like the theme I’m using any more. In fact, it’s now gone all the way past “don’t like it”. I hate it. H-a-t-e it. I’ve been away from blogging for, you know, years. I have a stack of draft posts I’ve written over that time (some no longer relevant, of course). The main reason I didn’t publish them was, ridiculously, because I don’t like the look of the site. Ewww, can’t put my shiny new words on that thing!

It’s not like it’s difficult to change the theme, either. But using a pre-made theme means it’s not going to be to my exact specifications! Whatever those are. Ugh. So I’ve been meaning to make a new theme, but I haven’t been well enough, and blah blah blah. I may as well just slap a pre-made theme on and deal with it. And if it’s near enough, make a child theme to tweak it. I can’t hate it more than what I’ve got right now, right?

Teenage Dreams

It’s my blogoversary (or my blog’s blogoversary, or whatever) today, and slightly scarily it’s now 13 years old. I’m expecting hormonal tantrums with it banging around the house and yelling that it hates me any day now.

They grow up so fast!

And now that I’ve remembered to post here again today, I shall have to make some effort to blog… well, if not regularly, then at least more often. I’ve had quite an eventful few months, so I dare say I’ll be rambling on about that.

An Actual Knitting Post

No, really!

I haven’t done a lot of knitting (or spinning, and certainly not crochet) lately.  And by lately, I mean… the last 18 months.  Or thereabouts.  But in the last week or two I’ve picked up a couple of projects that’ve been languishing and started work on them again.

First of all there’s a hat for Miss RA.  Whether or not she’ll wear it is another matter.  She doesn’t seem too keen on keeping hats on!  Anyway, this is it so far:Bumpity Bump hat

And the other thing I’ve picked up again are the mittens for Mum’s shoebox project.  I didn’t finish them for last year’s box, so I figure if I do them now then I can be ahead of the curve for this autumn.

Shoebox Mittens 2013

I’ve been thinking I should also get at least one of the jumpers that are laying around in bits finally sewn up.  Yeahhh.  I’ll get right on that.

Stuck already!

Or, How To Be Extra-Specially Rubbish at Blogging, by Lou.

Oh dear.

So, it’s all of day two of this challenge thingy, and already I’m kind of stuck for what to write about.  So I’m writing about not being able to decide what to write about, mainly so that I’ll have something posted today at all!  Also, in the hope that if I keep typing, my fingers will come up with something that my brain has stalled over.  Or something like that.

Actually, I think it worked.  Because it’s not so much that I can’t think of anything to blog about, as that I have several things, but can’t decide which to start with.  So instead, I’m going to ramble about WordPress plugins.  Fascinating, hmm?  Specifically, it’s the plugin that autoposts to Plurk that’s giving me trouble – yesterday it did a weird triple post with the temporary page preview address in it instead of the address for the published post.  When I had a look on WP.org, I discovered that the plugin hasn’t been updated for ages, so that’s likely the issue there.  There are some new ones that should do the trick instead, so I’m going to install one of those instead.  Although since those also post to Twitter and FB (which I’m currently using the Jetpack module to do), I think I’ll swap over for those as well.  Assuming the new plugin works the way I want it to and all that.  /ramble.

In other news, I really want to go to the Nine Worlds con.  Really really really really really.  That would, of course, involve me Leaving The House and Going To London, and hard stuff like that.  Not to mention paying for the ticket and hotel, so.  We’ll see.  But I wanna!

It’s my Blogoversary

It’s my blogoversary today – eleven whole years since I started this blog!  It’s gone through some changes in that time, of course.  Webby tech has advanced and all that.  And of course I haven’t been able to blog steadily throughout the whole time.  But the last eleven years have been fairly definitive for me in a lot of ways, so I’m glad I never seriously thought about closing the blog down.

So, happy birthday, blog, and here’s to many more years… but first let’s see if I can re-establish the blogging habit during 2012!

A decade of blogging

I very nearly forgot altogether, but yesterday was my “blogoversary”.  The tenth anniversary of starting this blog, in fact.

Happy Blogday to me


It doesn’t feel like ten years, but then there have been some years where I’ve barely blogged at all, or at least times when I’ve been mostly using Livejournal or similar platforms instead.  As I think I’ve said in previous anniversary posts, this blog has gone through a few changes in terms of its back-end platform – Blogger, Movable Type, and now WordPress – over the last decade.  I feel pretty settled now, though.  And at least I’m managing to post more, if not regularly.

Perhaps with this new blogging year, I should make that a mini-resolution: to pick a day and blog regularly once a week.  After all, if I can blog every day for a month, I can do once a week at the least.  In fact, since it’s Friday today, why not have Friday as my must-post day.  If I can’t think of anything else to say, at least I could do a weekly round up.  Preferably it’ll kick start me (again) into posting more frequently than that.  Right then, I’m going to go off and stop talking about posting, and actually make a start on posting something with Real Content.  Good night.

No(t much) Snow

We’ve had a little bit of snow today, but it hasn’t really settled.  Which is good, because it meant that the rails and roads were OK for getting back from the Skunk Anansie gig at Brixton Academy last night.  That was fantastic, by the way, and if I can find the words I’ll try to write up some kind of review.

Today, I’ve finally been working on the photo album for this site again.  So, as an experiment, let’s try displaying a gallery from it on this post…

Continue reading “No(t much) Snow”

And we’re back

I thought I wasn’t going to get to post today, because the website has been down since about midnight last night, and it wasn’t looking hopeful!  But then my host fixed everything (hooray), and although I had to restore a couple of posts again, at least I had a backup of my own this time.  That’s right, I got cautious.

So today, while I’ve been working on the site design, I’ve only just uploaded it, and… well, a couple of things aren’t quite working yet.  Ah well, try again tomorrow.  I’m happy enough with most of it.

Now, I’m off to bed, as I am library-ing in the morning.  Good night!

Coding, Comments and Connectivity

I’ve been faffing around with the design of the non-blog pages on this site today and yesterday… and I’ve made a right hash of it! That’ll teach me to try modifying someone else’s code rather than writing my own. I’m going to take a step back and do some rewriting – it’ll make more sense to me that way, and hopefully even work!

In other news, today is the start of this month’s IComLeavWe, and marks a year since I first joined that group! Maybe I’ll try for Iron Commenter status this time around. I’ll have a crack, at any rate.

IComLeavWe
IComLeavWe: Join the Conversation

Comments awaaaaaaaaaay! (If only the website will stay up; this server move seems to be taking longer than I expected… Apparently there are now some issues with SQL that’s causing database connection errors. Which temporarily eats this site! Hopefully that will be fixed soon.)

Repost for 18 Nov: In which my computer was unhappy, but my web server more so.

I should have taken a back-up after I posted yesterday.  I should have known.  But silly me, I didn’t.  So the entry I did post is gone, eaten I assume by the server move that’s happening with my web host at the moment.  It didn’t help that I was having computer troubles the same day.

Argh! icon from my LJMy livejournal feed did manage to grab the entry before it vanished again, so I can tell you that it was posted at 23:57, the post id is one which doesn’t exist in my current database, and the excerpt text (whyyyyy did I never change to full text feeds?!) says:

“Oh dear, my computer hasn’t been firing on all cylinders today.  I’m pretty sure the problem was with my virus checker since it all started after a change to that.  I’ve run a ‘repair’ thingy on it, and hopefully everything …”

… and then I continued on to say that all should work now, fingers crossed etc, the end.  That LJ feed will only stay there for 10 days, I think, so it’s not a permanent record.  Bah!

I hope the mods are OK with counting this for yesterday’s NaBloPoMo entry, considering I did post, but it vanished.  I shall drop them a line to check, I think.

I fibbed

Well, sort of – I said I would post pictures of the finished shawl today, and I haven’t got around to taking and uploading them yet.  What I do have is a sort-of, half-finished, almost new blog design.  Yeah, I know, but it’ll do for now – there will be many more adjustments to come.  It’s a fork of the Thirty-ten WP child theme.  Pictures by me, some things (like the Rav bars) not working yet.  Maybe tomorrow.

S is for Spinning

I can’t believe it’s come round again already, but the Tour de Fleece starts again on 3rd July.  Which means I shall be spinning along with many many others for the duration of the Tour de France bike race.  I probably won’t be actually watching the race as I spin, because I have other things I want to watch and listen to that interest me more.  I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to be spinning yet, but I think “as much as possible” covers it fairly well.

Happily, I’ve solved the missing post button (and tags and categories areas) problem in the edit screen.  Of course I went and did all the standard things first, like disabling all my plugins.  And then it occurred to me to try changing the screen back to the default 2 column view, instead of the 1 column I had it set on.  Oh look, there were the missing areas.  I’ve now rearranged and reset it back to the way it was, and all is well.  Hoorah!

R is for Reciprocity

IComLeavWeToday is the first day of June’s IComLeavWe, the comment-leaving equivalent of NaBloPoMo.  Well, sort of – the aim is to leave five comments, and return / reply to one, every day during the week of the 21st-28th of the month.  So it’s an equivalent in that it’s a daily goal … thingy.  I know what I mean, anyway.  You can either leave comments on the blogs of the other participants, and/or any other blogs you like, really.  It’s more a self-monitored thing, I suppose, since unless you list all the places you’ve commented back on your own blog, there’s no central record.  Anyway!  The point is, it’s a cool way to find new blogs and meet new people and all – many of the blogs on the list are ones I wouldn’t normally read.  Although I am going to try to make an effort to start leaving comments for the people I do habitually read again.  I’ve been rubbish about it, really.  Perhaps I should have a try at a little double thing – five comments to the IComLeaveWe bloggers, and five to people on my own blogroll.  Could be fun!

In other news, there seems to be a bit of a hitch with this new version of WP… or at least, there is for me.  Something has disappeared some of the sections from the Post page (the one that I’m writing in!), including the all-important Post button!  I can get around it because there’s a draft-save mechanism, and then I can post from the edit screen, but still.  That’s not right!  I may have to disable some plugins and see what happens.

Upgrading

(Or, Non-alphabetical Post The Third)

WordPress 3.0 is out – has been for a couple of days, actually – so I’m going to do the upgrade soon.  Probably not tonight, but most likely tomorrow morning.  I’m glad I hadn’t got too far with the redesign I was working on, in terms of coding, so now I can incorporate anything new to the theme.  I’m not sure if there is anything, but if there is, I might as well include it.  It’s all good practise, after all.