I did it. The Tante Leah pages are all up. The links all work. The categories work. The Photoblog is working.
Tomorrow?
A dip in the pool, and a little sewing.
And lots, lots, lots more photos in the Tante Leah section and the Photoblog.
Tonight? Martinis all around.
In this case, and believe me, I am as sick of these entries about the trials and tribulations of code writing as you all are, I have achieved a small break through in the photo pages, i.e.: the formatting is displaying more or less correctly, and the categories are right, even though the photos themselves don’t actually display… yet…but now I’ve lost the customization of my technorati tag cloud.
I’m sick of this code war. I’m sick of not sewing.
The RLA is facing losing his two classes this semester because the full-time faculty’s classes didn’t fill, so they have the right to usurp his. Of course, his classes fill because they are advertised as being his classes, and students line up to study under him. Duh. That’s why his classes are full and the full-timers aren’t.
I went to visit my mother this weekend, and she was…not alert, to say the least. But the aides laughed and told me that she’s a good eater, and she’s gaining a little weight.
At work, there is a storm on the horizon and change in the air, and none of it is good.
But tomorrow? Tomorrow is another day, and Star and the Surrogate Daughters and I are going to go to a Marlins game after work. They are playing (in the miserable cement heat sink of Dolphins’ Stadium) the Atlanta Braves. It is one of those amusing quirks of baseball that no matter how deep in the cellar the Fish are, nor how high in the standings the Braves are, that more times than not, the Marlins will beat the Braves. And that, gentle readers, is Why I Love Baseball.
The comments work. The links work. The search works. The archives work. Every entry has at least one category assigned to it. Whew. That was a lot of code and cigarettes, but it’s all up and running.
Now for the next part: the static pages, where I’ll put all Tante Leah’s Handmades, at least those which are part of the portfolio and already sold. This means going back into the Expression Engine dark forest. I’ll be searching for clues and pre-written code. I’ll be reading every page ever written about Expression Engine (all ten of them). I’ll be going back and forth between print outs of code that looks like it should work and the pages I’ve built from that code that don’t work. I’ll be editing code and I’ll be tearing my hair out. I’ll be cursing and testing and testing and cursing. And cursing and drinking and smoking and testing. It’s not really live, but you can take a peek at the first couple of pages by clicking on the link over there on your right. (Tante Leah’s Handmades)
And then, when that’s all working, it’ll be on to the re-imagined Cafe Press shop. I have t-shirts ready, and photos to go on notebooks, and all of that.
And then, it’ll be time to open the studio door and start sewing.
To my blog.
I did something to something at some time on Saturday and blew up my site. A mere $15 and desperate e-mail to tech support later, and my site is back…to where it was a week ago before I got the comments working right.
Sigh.
But here I am, back on the dining room table, banging out code and loving it. Sort of like loving getting tattoos. You know? When you’re done, it’s a beautiful thing and you forget the pain. Sort of. Until you get the urge to do it again.
On another, yet just as typical note, the wonderful Paul Gallo of the house of Gallofornia was here visiting over the weekend. Yesterday, I skipped work and the master made a muslin for me. Yesh! I have my own, personal, hand-made original Gallo fitting muslin. I can’t wait to get into the sewing room with that bad boy and some of the yummy nummy knits I’ve been buying lately from Gorgeous Things and Emma One-Sock.
But enough about joy, it’s back to code and pain. Oh. Yeah. Pain. By request, the Number Two Surrogate Daughter’s finished tat:
Well, gentle readers. The headlines now link correctly to the perma-links for each entry.
The comments link to comments and allow you to enter same.
The categories link to categories.
And here are a couple of shots from yesterday’s excursion to Altered States:
Number two daughter’s new tat.
And my new gloriosa lily, at just over life size. It’s on my left wrist.
Well, more like pulling hen’s teeth. I have taken several days off of code writing since getting this back on line. Now I have to tweak and tease and make it pretty. Add some non-breaking spaces here and there. Get more links to work, because I don’t know about you, but I’m already tired of looking at my Dread 404 error page.
This weekend I have to go to Stuart, retrieve the Number 2 Surrogate Daughter from her summer of indentured servitude and bring her back to Miami. As a reward for packing up my parents’ home, and in addition to her pay, I’m taking her to my favorite tattoo parlor for some ink work. She’s getting a molecule, and I’m thinking about a wrist piece featuring this flower.
Star knows this and in fact is coming along for the ride. Whether I can talk her into some ink is unlikely. Unlikely like me voting Republican kind of unlikely, which is to say when ice skating is Hell’s favorite sport.
Well, sweetiedarlings, was it worth the wait? There are still a number of elements that I haven’t gotten working smoothly, yet, specifically, my photo blog is still down, and comments can be a little wonky*, but here it is.
The new site, on a new server, using a new CMS. I only had to call tech support once, and if I’d been keeping a notebook of all the things I’d tried that failed (which I started doing after talking to tech support) I wouldn’t have had to call. It was a matter of variables, and I thought I’d tried every possible string, but I hadn’t. Once I started keeping notes, things went a little faster.
Anyway, the extended link isn’t up and working, so for now, all entries will be in the main window, but still and all. People, I have been pounding code since I crawled out of bed from the bronchial infection. I’ve been sitting at my keyboard from the moment I get home until I get to bed, and that time has been pushed back to 2 a.m. and beyond on the weekends. Tonight, the RLA and I went to the grocery store after work, bought something to eat, and then it was on to the code war.
And at 11:19 p.m. on July 30, 2007, I moved all the files, reset the path and sent this bad puppy out into the interwebs.
Did you miss me while I was gone?
* Hint for the comments. Try clicking on the title of the entry. Now that the main push is over, I can fine tune the code. Any help is welcome.
It’s not like I’m not trying. And it’s not like I haven’t been saving and notating and blah blah blah. For hours and hours and hours on end. Till 2 in the morning. Before breakfast. After work. But still, this new site isn’t pulling from its data base. Isn’t dynamic. Isn’t worth the pixels its printed on.
I was at the laptop on Saturday, gearing up to scan in another dozen or so vintage knitting patterns, and maybe a few vintage sewing patterns to populate the old Etsy shop, when, much to my surprise and chagrin, my laptop put itself into deep sleep. And it Wouldn’t Wake Up. I shook it, gently: “Wakey, wakey, computer.” I pressed the reset key. I held the power key down. I struck any number of key combinations. I plugged and unplugged various peripherals. I inserted a cd…or at least attempted to. I pulled the power. I shut the power on and off, attempting to pulse the laptop back to life in an electronic version of electroshock therapy. All of which accomplished exactly nil.
In despair, I did the only thing left to me: I took my precious in to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store. And the geniuses concluded that my laptop was asleep and wouldn’t wake up and they had no clue why, either. All of which is to say that my laptop is still down the street and I am going through major computer/blog/gossip/e-mail withdrawal.
So. On another topic, entirely, I offered a couple of old programming books on the local Freecycle group. They were a couple of years old, but ColdFusion hasn’t changed much. A data base slurper is a data base slurper and PHP is PHP. Right?
I got an e-mail response from another freecycler that went like this:
I can’t believe you have text books for a subject which all reasonable and respectable scientists have dismissed as impossible. Are they really teaching this somewhere?
It took a while, but I responded: HA! Good one. You had me going there for a minute. ColdFusion is a programming language, as I’m sure you know.
