Second, I revamped the site entirely and it feels a lot better, more me. More at home. I feel more comfortable posting here now, which I definitely like.

When I’m not posting here, I’m usually posting at my LiveJournal¹ or Twitter, though some stories that get posted at Twitter get expanded upon here. Some stories that are posted at LiveJournal are posted here as well.

In other news, I am still alive and chainsaw man did not kill me, though he nearly did my sanity in, I swear.

Additionally, the best thing that has ever happened to me in my whole entire life happened today. In that I found out that If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is playing at the Seattle Children’s Theatre for the next month. The only way I could possibly be more excited is if instead of a mouse, the main character was a moose. And if instead of a cookie, they gave him a muffin.

1. Username available upon request.

After taking nearly two years off, I decided one day to go back to school starting almost immediately afterwards. The professor that was rumored to bring cookies every Friday? He did. He was also the best English teacher I’ve ever had.

In early or mid-June I decided to move away from home (and Seattle) for the first time to Bellingham, Washington…two weeks later. Where I knew no one. On June 22nd I made that move. I’m going to Western Washington University for summer quarter. I intend on fully transferring for winter quarter. The elementary education program here is awesome.

It’s been a little scary, but awesome. Sometimes you just have to do something crazy to get your life in order, I think.

I hope to be posting here more–for real this time.

Stuff I need to do:

• Redesign donut.nu
• Update WordPress
• Find and install a good plugin for comment threads
• Update my ‘about me’ pages–much as changed

Three site-related things I’ve been considering:

1. Starting a book blog.

I’ve been pondering reviewing all the books I’ve read as well as posting about all the books I’m excited about, my library loot, my 2009 reading projects, and other book-related things.

My problem: The amount of books I read in addition to the amount of time I spend thinking about books would take over my entire blog and thus might push away people that have no interest in reading about my reading habits.

My other problem: Reading is the hobby that says more about me than all of my other hobbies combined. Pushing it out of this blog entirely is sort of like separating it from myself.

Possible solution: I could post a weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly wrap-up of everything important going on at the book blog as well as link reviews in my book log and project pages, etc. It’s easier for readers to skip over one to four posts per month than 66.7% of a blog.

2. Redesigning and recoding all of my fanlistings as well as my fanlisting collective.

This desperately needs to get done. It’s been on my to-do list for about two years, perhaps longer.

Plus I’ve recently been approved for the Ron Perlman, David the Gnome, and The Boondocks fanlistings so I need to create those as well.

3. Adding a new layout here!

I’ve designed a layout for my fanlisting collective that, honestly, I want to put up here instead because I really like it. It’s rainbow though. Not rainbow all over the damn place. Just…rainbow. I like rainbows.

I still really like the current layout, but it’s really old. I could always consider adding a theme switcher, though.

I’ve also rewritten most of the about section. A few kinks are still being worked out, particularly with the film and book logs. In addition, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.7 which was a bitch to upgrade from a plug-ins perspective.

My new RSS feed is feeds.feedburner.com/donutnu

Why Donut.nu, you ask?

Well, me being lazy, I’m just going to copy paste what I wrote under the website section.

My first name is Donna. One of the most awesome people on the planet, my friend Patricia, calls me Donut. She informed me that dona in Spanish means ‘doughnut’–at least in Venezuela. There’s also a slight Veronica Mars connotation there for me.

Oddly, I loathe doughnuts. Except the powdered ones. Those are delicious.

I chose it because it’s short, sweet, easy to remember, and still personal at the same time. It’s a name I can keep for a long time.

I’ve decided to go by my first name from here on out rather than my middle, particularly since Donut.nu is based upon said name.

I’ll moving to a new site within the next few days and will be posting much more often.

Despite the bad, a few good things have happened since my last entry:

1) I went to see The Phantom of the Opera when the tour came to Seattle. It was a-effing-mazing and worth every penny of the exorbinant amount I spent on my four row-center tickets. Despite the fact I totally couldn’t afford them.

2) I took a day trip to Bellingham with my friend who was catching the ferry to Alaska.

I loved it, particularly Fairhaven. It was pouring down rain when we arrived by train and the first thing we see is a fish and chip shop being run out of a double-decker bus with a gazebo on the side for indoor dining. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen at that point. We were there for over half an hour and yet our food managed to be burn-your-mouth hot the entire time.

Click on image to go to source.

It’s particularly good that I loved it because I’ll be moving up there when I transfer to Western Washington University for their elementary education program.

I want to get my master’s degree in Library and Information Science (an MLIS) so I want to get my teaching qualifications as an undergraduate while still being able to double major. The education program before the double major is a five and a half year program. Adding in another concentration to that might add a considerable amount of time, but I’m hoping to plan it well.

3) My friend and I have resolved to travel through Europe for three months in 2009, unless one of us wins the lottery in which case we’re replacing the words ‘Europe’ and ‘three months’ with ‘the world’ and ‘forever’. Likely from September to December. I’ve done the math on what I need to save (plus what I was saving for my formal education, but am now deciding to blow on travel–a different sort of education, but arguably of equal importance) so I’m in the process of trying to find an additional job or two that pays the same or better than my current job.

I’ve also been building a new site. Alas, that’s been going slowly since I’m pondering a new domain¹ and I just got a new job.

I’m sort of trying to build something that’s clean. Something I’m not worried about people I know finding.

I’ll be keeping the old blog posts, but making it more personal in addition to geeky stuff I post about instead of just posting personal stuff in my LiveJournal (with the exception of stuff that needs to be locked).

1. Something I can stick with forever or for at least a very long while. I have one idea. I want something short.

Usually, a shiny colour scheme I’m dying to play with starts beating me around the head, but now? Nothing.

I’m thinking I should read some good Photoshop tutorials, look for some more design resources, and try out something new. Trouble is, these days, I’m not even sure where to find good, informative, or inspiring Photoshop tutorials. Sure, you can Google for them, but, as with most things, 95% of what Google pulls up is total crap.

This layout block has me so ensnared that I have two perfectly good posts written¹, but instead of editing/adding/rethinking bits or even just posting as-is, I’ve been stressing over layout ideas. It’s verging on the point of ridiculous.

How do you get past layout block? What are your favorite design resources?

1. One I wrote a week ago in which I rant about how I recently had an epiphany that I have to be a teacher, but I’ll probably get shot!

First issue was that in my welcome email they sent me the wrong nameservers and they took a fairly long time to give me the actual ones after I sent in a support ticket.

Second issue was that the FTP wasn’t working for any of the accounts I had set up so the faulty nameservers wouldn’t have made a bit of difference anyway since there was no way I could upload thousands of files via file manager.

Third issue: Someone I host needs domain.com/icons/ and icons.domain.com/icons/ to show what she actually has uploaded in those directories to keep her links alive versus a listing of Apache icons (which you can see demonstrated here if you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about¹). The subdomain, icons.domain.com, shows what she has uploaded to the icons directory, but domain.com/icons/ does not and neither does icons.domain.com/icons/.

I read in the Site5 Forums that they have been able to change this in a case-by-case basis. I explain very simply what is needed. I even include links. They email me to say:

Hi,

I’m able to access http://domain.com/icons/ without any problems. Are you still unable to access it? What is the error that you get?

I said nothing about errors in my original ticket. I even specifically said that when I access it it’s a directory listing of Apache icons and how that’s not what is needed.

I just ended up explaining to tech support how Apache servers work. I should be on their payroll.

I wake up this morning to this lovely message:

Hello,

What you can do is to create a symbolic link for the /icons folder. That way both icons.domain.com/icons and domain.com/icons will show the exact same content.

Please let us know if you have questions.

Dude, that’s like the exact opposite of what I want. Why would I want to do that?! I want it to display what’s actually uploaded to them, not display the exact same content².

And why would they just say ‘create a symbolic link’? How many people emailing technical support will actually know what they mean by that? Just because I understand why /icons/ displays what it does doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll know the ins and outs of .htaccess. It mostly means that I’ve been messing around with different servers for the past eight years and have seen a lot of different hosting and server situations. It also means I am a master Google-ninja extraordinaire so if I don’t understand something, I’ll just fucking Google it before I ask questions.

Does someone have good stories about Site5 and/or Site5′s support? Because right now I’m about ready to rip out my hair and I paid for an entire year in advance to save myself $100USD and because everyone says they’re so great.

Update: Partial victory! Apparently they understood enough to enable domain.com/icons/ which is good…except for the part where I said at least three times that domain.com/icons/ could be lived without and icons.domain.com/icons/ was what we were really looking for. I’m hoping it won’t be too difficult to get that enabled, but I’m not getting my hopes up. ;)

1. In that directory I actually have a file called rss.png uploaded and nothing else, but you won’t see rss.png at all, much less be able to link to it from elsewhere, like what she needs.
2. Which it’s already doing, technically speaking, since both are displaying ugly Apache icons used for FancyIndexing.

Customer: You’re drinking Coke for breakfast?
Server: Yeah, I always drink Coke in the mornings. I don’t know why, but it always wakes me up and makes me hyper! But I don’t know why.
Customer: …
My mum, my brother, and me: [collectively die laughing]

Nothing to do with the amount of sugar high fructose corn syrup and caffeine, yeah?

My fifteen-year-old brother isn’t exactly the brightest crayon in box, and even he said “Oh my G-d” before banging his head on the table.

Now we go back there to get breakfast all the time just so we can eavesdrop on this girl’s conversations and get our daily dose of laughter. Perhaps stupidity is good for business?

Also, grr at Site5 for the server and FTP issues I’ve had recently. Durga, the server my sites are on, was down for several hours earlier today and FTP still isn’t working on some domains, but not others. So far, since I switched to Site5 about two or three weeks ago, it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing. I hope things get straightened out so I can enjoy my escape from DreamHost.

Amusingly, now that I’ve put this layout up, it’s sunny in Seattle. Last night, when I was making it, it was pouring.

I also reworked my about me page quite a bit, though I still need to add a few things.

I’m going to try to get as many mini-reviews of books up soon as I’ve read over 60 books in 2007 already. I’d really like to keep a reading log.

I stopped making sites about a year and a half ago because of personal issues and I felt as if I had met a dead end. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to get my coding knowledge back up to how it was at that time as well as improve in the areas I was clearly failing.

I still have several pages that aren’t yet complete; my about me page is absolutely horrific at the moment. I’m going to spend some time working on that today, I believe.

I’ve been a bit busy lately as the other day as we got a new puppy (who seems to move far too fast to get a good picture with the only camera I have access to) and I have a terrible cold.