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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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Maiden Voyage

Hello! You made it. I guess the directions to get here that I left for you weren’t as vague as I had feared.  Quick – click Add to Favorites right now! Okay… onward to the WordPress blogging platform test drive.*

As you can see, elfini is now a sub-domain of dawnblanchfield.com. No more typing elfini-thescenicroute.blogspot.com. Man that url sucked. I just didn’t know any better when I first set up that blog. I would love to get elfini.com, but that is taken by some Turkish spoon maker or something. So here we are. I’m flexible. (shut-up Chris!)

Well, what do you think about the new digs? Do you like it?** Are you as freaked out by change as I am? I’m surprised I’m not drinking vodka from a sippy cup by now. I had been thinking about making this change for some time now. Then we ended up staying home this past weekend, and instead of working on my painting, I got creative with code. I’m not sure what prompted me to start this process, but once I had exported that first file from Blogger there was no turning back. I was muckin’ about in .xml files, FTP, MySQL, .css, and what the hell is .php?! Wait, don’t tell me – I don’t want to know. Finally, after much weeping and nashing of teeth, 2 1/2 days later it was finished. All previous posts from Blogger are now here. I’ve added the links, badges and widgets. I’ve got rotating header photos. Fancy. And I’ve got ideas for Phase 2 of my master web-site plan. I can say no more about that though, because I know you… you’ll be expecting it all done by next Wednesday! And that just ain’t gonna happen. As Chris would be more than happy to tell you, I get a tad “focused” when I’m doing web stuff (ok, any kind of stuff). So, I think after I get this posted, I’ll take a little break from blog tweaking. Download the pics I took of Erin in her new pool yesterday. Too cute! Maybe poke around the NAPP site now that I’m finally a member. Read my new book.  Aaw hell, who am I kidding? I’ll hit publish and have Photoshop opened before this file has even loaded. I have a problem. Admitting it is the first step right?

 
*Yes, technically I’ve been blogging with WordPress ever since I started the Dawn Blanchfield Photography site. But that is a photo blog and uses a plug-in (YAPB) to add the photos. So, I never written a post proper. Wow, you people can be picky. Slowly step away from the literal…

**Really, what do you think? Like? Don’t like? Is it too wide for your monitor? How about the colors? I’m not thrill with the way the Twitter Update widget looks, but that’s a part of the theme I can’t seem to edit. But I will say that Atalualpa is the most user-friendly theme for customization I’ve run across.  5 stars baby! Anyway, Welcome Aboard! Leave me a comment and tell me what you think.