Fractured Dreams

After 3 weeks of frustration, it became apparent that my webhost wasn’t going to get its servers up and running any time soon. Ironic that after all the long hiatuses I’ve taken from blogging over the years, here I was with a growing list of posts and my site was down completely. I’d been working on a new layout, a mashup of a couple of travel-themed vectors I found … somewhere … on the Web, so I took the opportunity to give the place a much-needed new look that reflects my growing travel obsession. I’ve also added a trip page, linked in the sidebar —> listing where I’ve been and confirmed upcoming trips — I thought about adding places I’m planning to go, but that could quickly get out of control!

There are a few things here and there that need fixing, but I’ll adjust them as I go — I’m eager to get out of the guts of Wordpress PHP scripts and get posting!

By the way, today is my seventh blogiversary. (Yes, I purposely chose 03/03/03 to launch my domain.) I think this is the first time I’ve been blogging even semi-regularly enough to actually recognise it. I started this site when I was a university student spending too much time reading blogs and admiring their pretty layouts, and designing my own was the perfect tool of procrastination while coursework and deadlines piled up.

Since then I’ve dipped in and out of posting — some of the ‘outs’ have lasted as much as a year — but now I feel like writing here regularly and there are things I want to say. So at the seven-year mark it’s the start of a new chapter. Now I just need to find time to put together the new layout I’ve had mind for months.

I certainly didn’t intend to disappear for the better part of a month there, but aside from being busy with work and hospital visits and Miss J being in London, you may have noticed my lovely free host (shut up, I’m broke ) dropped off the face of the earth, well Internet, without warning, taking a couple of blog posts and my entire joined fanlisting collective with it. As you might imagine, I’m extremely pissed.

I’d literally just finished the collective a day or so before and I hadn’t got around to backing up the database. Thankfully I had an earlier version of the database with the blog on it or I’d be really screwed. This I have learned is an issue with PHP and SQL – I’m used to doing everything offline and manually uploading it so this kind of thing wouldn’t be a problem. I managed to salvage the PHP files, which I’d edited online, from my temp files, so I haven’t actually lost the site – it’s just I have to reinstall Enthusiast and go through the tedious task of adding the fanlisting URLs and buttons.

Still, I’m back, and on a nice new host with a better admin panel and features on the backend. There’s a few things I need to fix here – especially the Now Reading plugin, which is totally messed up – let me know if you see anything else; broken images or links or whatever.

Aaand I’m back! I think this might be my best layout so far – it should be after all the time I’ve spent on it. When I started making it I decided that instead of recoding my html it was high time I switched to Wordpress. Yes, I have been handcoding everything since 2003. It got to the stage where I figured it was easier to carry on rather than have to install and set up the tools. But I’ve moved to a new webspace account that supports sql and php, so while I was at it I thought I might as well learn how to use them.

So it’s taken me weeks to teach myself php, code the layout, move my archives over, etc, etc. I still haven’t sorted out everything – the very cool Now Reading plugin breaks the sidebar in Internet Explorer and I have no idea how to fix it. (If you do, please let me know.) Sorry if you’re viewing the site in IE – I know it looks like crap – but hey, it looks fine in Firefox! I need to go through and add titles to some of my old posts, the categories could be organized better, and there’s other minor nitpicks, but I can fix those as I go along.

Next project is revamping the Shades of Purple site, which I’m going to switch to Wordpress as well. That’ll be a mammoth task, because it’s got a huge archive to move over. Oh, fun. Still, it’ll be great when it’s done – so much easier to use.

I’m working on new features for this site, and when I was out yesterday I decided I’m going to start doing a “Photo Friday”, where I’ll blog a photo taken on my camera phone of various things in London – my favourite buildings, places, or regular fixtures in my life. I actually like the way pictures come out with the low resolution – you get this feeling of movement that I think fits in well with the concept of being out and about town. So look out for the first picture on Friday!

[Edited 02/09/06: I've discovered there is an actual Photo Friday blog challenge I didn't even know about, lol - that one is based on a single word for the week. Seems like a cool one to try with a proper camera...]

Inspired by my shiny new laptop (yay!) I’m feeling all creative and I’ve decided to reorganize the domain into a proper collective for my various sites (and more to come). I’m thinking about applying to create a couple of fanlistings and I’d like to get sorted first. I’ve replaced the splash page with a new layout, and I’m planning to redesign all of the sites, including this one. So I might disappear for a few weeks to work on layouts and coding and such, but hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m up and running again (where have I heard that before).

Toodles

Boy, I feel old. I’ve got the radio on in the background and the DJ just played an old Take That song; when he referred to their upcoming concert and wondered if it’ll be filled with screaming girls, he corrected himself and said it’ll more likely be screaming mums with their 2.4 children. Being of the Take That era — I was starting secondary school when they were big and everyone was crushing on Mark while I fancied Gary — I find that rather depressing.

On the subject of time passing, I haven’t posted for exactly(!) two months, but hey — new layout! I’ve been fiddling with the content boxes on the right for ages and finally, here we are. Check out the new stuff like the mini book review — the plan is to build up an archive of them and if I’m feeling ambitious I might add music reviews. The reading list and playlist just show the last five books I’ve read and CDs I’ve played. I’m looking for affiliates again so if you’re interested, drop me a line and I’ll add a new section.

The wanderer has returned!

Well, I actually returned ages ago, but that’s a long story.

One that I’ll tell in the new year.