Category: web design

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Obviously

oh my god what is wrong with me?? It hasn’t even been a full month since I built that new website on Adobe Portfolio and I’ve already scrapped it! There was nothing wrong with it, I just had all my stuff spread over too many separate sites. So I just spent the last 3 days reconfiguring my WordPress Elfini blog site to do it all – portfolio, blog and online store. I even relocated the whole installation from a sub-domain to the root directory. Holy hell why do I do these things to myself?!

And then this morning when I thought all was well except a few more design tweaks, I found that I couldn’t upload images to WordPress! Oh that is not okay! So, I hit the google. And I tried all the things. Nothing worked. And I tried some more things. And then I totally broke the site.

::very external screaming::

So, knowing my poor blood pressure was going to hit unhealthier levels than normal (I’ll tell you about my blood pressure woes later), I reminded myself that I have backups. Lots and lots of backups (this ain’t my first website rodeo). So, I hopped back into the FTP client and deleted the whole shebang and then re-uploaded yesterday’s subdomain folder that I had downloaded before I moved it and ta-da! Everything is working and I can upload images and at some point I might even start breathing again. fuck. Don’t tell my doctor about any of this. Or any English teachers who would be appalled at my infatuation with run on sentences. I save all my punctuation for .php files.

Now, I just need to figure out how to hide the sidebar on the shop pages and make the portfolio page full width – it really shouldn’t be this difficult! And after I give up on that because I spent most of yesterday trying to crack that nut, I need to create a bunch of product pages because Big Cartel doesn’t have an export products function because of course they don’t. So…. yeah. Big fun happening over here.

But my birthday is Friday and we are going to Santa Cruz so cake and cooler weather. I’ll take it.

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Look at what I cooked up!

So, this here blog? elfini? It’s all Julie Tilsner’s fault.  4 years ago she said “Hey Dawn, you should start a blog!” And when Julie says “Jump”, I say “Fine… if you insist. But I’m not going to enjoy it.” And I think we all know how well this turned out.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago, Julie finally said “Hey Dawn, you should redesign my blog!” And I jumped up and down, said yes, and insisted she bail on the evil Typepad and migrate to WordPress.

And a word of advice here – do not get me started on Typepad and the Six Apart world. The seething raging hate!!

Luckily Julie bent to my will and is now happily hosting Bad Home Cooking on a spiffy new WordPress installation. And it looks something like this:

www.julietilsner.com

Now click the pretty picture and bask in the glory of the new and improved Bad Home Cooking! Same old funny wrapped in a shiny new package.

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Cold Coding Part Two

This time with less cold.

I’m like the house painter who’s own house never gets painted. My website is a mess. I’ve started more blogs and everything is all over the place. It was finally time to do something about it. So coming off the success (haha) of the photo blog, I’ve been attempting a custom Thesis design for the DB Designs Services site. I’ve been creating multiple feature boxes and mastering WordPress hooks – or at least attempting to.

It’s funny how I work. When downstairs and on the laptop, I have been been working on the thesis design. When I’m upstairs on my computer, I edit photos and work in Photoshop/Dreamweaver. And I just move back and forth between the two machines and the 2 projects. So, while upstairs yesterday I started designing a new home page for my website. A landing page to connect all my various sites. And BEHOLD! the new and improved dawnblanchfield.com~

Pretty spiffy eh? Next on the chopping block – a complete rebuild of my photography portfolio.  This time around there will be no flash. No flash!

Hey that reminds me, I need to make a cape for a certain someone’s <cough>Paul!</cough> upcoming birthday. Who has a bedazzler I can borrow?!

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Cold Coding

or coding with a cold. Either way – don’t do it.

Early last week Erin got sick and spent a night throwing up. It was … unpleasant. She had a slight fever the next day and then was fine. Of course, the following day Chris went down. He tried to drag me down with him, but I managed to stay out of the range of “deathly-ill, can’t get out of bed, must sleep more” and just hung out in the “Land of Feeling Like Crap and Fighting a Migraine” all weekend. I don’t recommend that place, the service sucks and the towels are really scratchy.

Anyways, the weekend was a slug-fest with Chris and I just lying around while the whirling dervish that we call Erin made a huge mess all around us. I basically spent 3 days just hanging out in my chair with the laptop keeping me warm. And since I had a bit of a break from Sweet Blog design work, I decided to finish up the work on my own design portfolio site and the photo-blog I created last Dec.

And apparently I was a bit sicker than I thought, because things were much more difficult than they should have been. I spent Friday trying – unsuccessfully I might add – to figure out how to add links to a WordPress theme. Links! What theme doesn’t allow links?! Could not get that stupid theme to work the way I wanted! So I moved on to other themes. That I couldn’t seem to get to work right either. weird. Of course I woke up Saturday morning and had a huge “DUH!” moment, climbed under the warmth of the laptop and viola! Links.

I moved on to the photo-blog. Now I thought this one was ready to go a week or so ago. I had a theme that I had customized to my liking, and had already spent quite some time hacking the files to add a navigation menu. What kind of theme doesn’t have a nav menu?! But like I said, I had added one and everything looked good. Then I tried to add a post with some text, not just a photo, and that’s when things got ugly. The formatting was all effed up. And this is where I came in on Saturday. Well, I can fix this. No I can’t. After much flailing around in the files, I decided to re-install the theme. Without making a copy first! oh what a rookie mistake. Lost everything. It wasn’t hard to recreate the styling changes, but the nav bar… ugh. After working on it for more endless hours, I still wasn’t happy with the formatting and decided to go another route. I would use the Thesis theme and design it to look like the photo-blog I originally had. Brilliant. And by this time it was Sunday and my head was much clearer. This was working. I even learned how to add a 4 column widget-ready footer to Thesis. Bitchin’.

and then when I was almost finished, just adding a few more little css tweaks… ::POOF:: all my custom code was deleted! everything but the line I had just added… gone. No backup. I took a couple deep breaths and started again. Again. And let me tell you, by this time I had that code dialed. I started from the top of the page and moved down div by div, copying and saving every few steps. And I was done in no time. And let me tell you – that is some lean, clean, code baby!

Check it out – Slamdance Photography.

wow. That kinda went on for awhile eh? Guess I’ll save those deranged princesses for next time. Something to look forward to.

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only mostly dead

Well. Apparently my lack of blog motivation knows no bounds. I have been taking classes. Making new art. Erin turned 3. We went to Disneyland. Brother-in-law was in a motorcycle accident…

::crickets::

Nothing.

I felt that elfini has run it course and I was ready to put this little blog o’ mine out to pasture as it were. I blame the all feedback I get from updating Facebook and Twitter. I know that people are reading those because I get comments and replies! amazing. I also starting a tumblr blog and found myself posting there. I love the clean, simple look of it. But I wasn’t “writing” for that blog – just posting photos, random videos and quotes. No pressure.

But I have decided to not give up on this site. (Mostly because the ubers said how much they missed my posts and well… how can I refuse them?) So in an effort to re-ignite some passion in me for this little corner of my mind – I am going to give the site a face-lift.

Of course I’m screaming busy with Sweet Blog work (YAY!!), woefully behind on photo editing,  my house is a wreck, and let’s not even mention laundry!  You might be stuck with this basic theme for a while before I can get around to styling it up all pretty and “dawn-like”.  In the meantime, I’ll try to update more often. I’m thinking a post full of pictures of deranged Disney princesses! Sound good?

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Pretty vacant

No need to be so smug about it

As you know, I’ve been working on the HS Tourney website for the last couple months. Well, last week I had finally gotten it to a state of ‘almost done’. The Add and Search functions were working. The forums were almost there. It was getting close. And Chris was getting antsy. By Thursday he was really pushing me to get the site up. Telling me not to worry about it being perfect. Ha! easy for him to say! So, when I should have been packing on Friday, I was moving the site from my local server to the hosting server. And the site is now (a)live and kicking! Check it out – www.hstourney.com  There are still a few things to tweak and pictures to add, but Bob is happy and coaches across the land have begun to add tournaments. And Chris was of course right – getting it pushed up before the long weekend allowed me to relax and enjoy the weekend. Damn it.

Only dead fish go with the flow

That was painted on a sidewalk on the University of Michigan campus when I attended x number of years ago. Well this week I embraced my inner-dead fish.

Tuesday night I drove downtown to the Urban Hive bldg with 8 framed prints in my car and visions of level loveliness dancing in my head. It was time to hang the Vox show! 6 of my photos are identically sized, matted and framed. They look fantastic and I pictured them all lined up in a nice tidy row on a large wall. Well, that’s not quite how things ended up. By the time I arrived, several prime hanging locations were already claimed. But I managed to get the long outside brick wall. Score! The photos would look great against the dark red bricks. The only problem was that the building owner has put a moratorium on anyone adding any more nails to the brick wall. You have to use whatever nails are already there. I understand the reasoning behind the decision, but… the nails that are currently in the wall? Not so evenly placed and nowhere near level. My pictures rose up and down like they were bouncing over random speed bumps. And the light kind of falls off at the left end of the wall. So, I moved frame #6 and the 2 extra images I brought to another section of the brick wall with one frame hanging about a foot lower than is reasonable. Ok. That was not how I envisioned things. I considered my options. I could deal with it or move everything to an interior wall in back. I chose to kiss that dead fish right on the mouth.  The photos still looked great – I decided they looked like they were riding a gentle wave. Lawrence said they reminded him of music. Suddenly I was totally at peace with things. And done. Which meant I was free to spend the rest of the evening help others. Sweet. The show is going to be awesome! And the Artist Reception is tomorrow night! Now the big question is – what am I going to wear?!

 
And hey, you would think that my brain would be a tranquil oasis now that the site is up and the show is hung. Wrong. The next-in-line panic item just moved right on into that recently vacated spot at the front of my brain. Next up – teaching yoga Monday night!