In an trial run of how easy it would be for me to quickly change the theme of Merilin without really changing the layout and graphics too much, I have now dressed it for Halloween. Nothing too fancy, I just wanted to see how it would work out to just change the colours around a bit (but not too much, because I am supposed to be writing a term paper). And it worked like a charm! Took me a while to agree with myself on the colour scheme - I downloaded quite a few Halloween-themed palettes from COLOURlovers.com, but none of them were quite what I needed. Now I almost want to celebrate Halloween. I’d make a pumpkin pie or something, but from what I know, pumpkins are wicked expensive here.

In other news, I went into the city today to see if I could find some new clothes. And I did! A pair of pants (black, for once. I can’t wear them yet because they need to be hemmed like whoa), a sweater and a knee-length skirt in the softest, stretchiest material EVER. I also tried on a coat that I really liked, but it was a teensy bit more expensive than what I want to be spending, so… I don’t know. Will have to think about it. The thing is, I need new shoes as well (I kinda want rainboots - they sell them with lining now, too, so they should be alright for snow - at least the way snow is here, where it stays snow for a day or two, then turns into slush), and I really don’t want to spend too much. I guess I could though, as I still haven’t spent a dime of what I’ve earned extra this year, but I’m sure there are rainy days ahead… (Which I guess justifies my need for rainboots? Yes? Yes??). I’m still earning a little extra by doing Norwegian DVD subtitles for a US-based company, but I’m not sure how much work they will have for me in the future.

I have to go back into the city tomorrow to order thank you cards for those who gave/sent us gifts for the wedding. I was going to make them myself, but really? I can’t be bothered. Too much on my plate right now. I actually had a 5 minute talk with my bank counselor today, about the prognosis of the mortgage interest rates for the next couple of years. Yeah. I am so IN this financial crisis business, I could almost work at a bank. Only that doesn’t seem to be the safest place to work right now, so no thank you.

It obviously is not done yet, but there was only so much tweaking I could do without implementing Wordpress into it, and that Maintenance Mode plugin just won’t work for me.

So here it is, in all its unfinished glory. Will get right on the tweaking.

Edit: Not sure about the cloud background for date/time/etc. - what do you think?

Also! I’m still surprised whenever my laptop is able to cope with Photoshop, iTunes, FTP and a whole lot of other programs running at the same time, without ever slowing down. I am so glad I got the model with upgraded system memory, and not the cheaper one with less memory and shared video memory.

The (financial) times, they are a-changing, but I’d rather not change my spending habits too much - so I’ve signed up for PayPerPost to see if maybe I can earn a bit of spare money on my blog. Yes, a lot of people will probably frown upon this, but if you’ve ever had any interest in my writing to begin with, I don’t see why that should change now.

A lot of people have recommended PPP to me - it seems that the lovely ladies over at Lavish especially favour it. So I decided to give it a go myself! So far it looks good – a few opportunities were available to me right from the get go, and the opps all look nice and legit. I also appreciate the fact that I can choose NOT to apply for an opp at all, should I not want to write anything about the product/site/etc in question.

(more…)

Wordpress 2.5 is here, and as always, the upgrade went smoothly. I can never upgrade without having a look at the WP upgrade page, just so that I can be sure that I haven’t missed a step (seriously, had I not read those instructions today, I would have forgotten to deactivate my plugins).

Speaking of plugins, the Livejournal crossposter plugin I’ve been using won’t activate after the upgrade - it tells me a fatal error occured. I seem to remember it doing that the last time I upgraded as well, but all of a sudden it decided it would work after all. Hopefully it can be resolved, as some people follow my blog only through Livejournal.

When I first navigated to my blog’s dashboard after upgrading, I swear my jaw dropped, if not to the floor, then at least down to my boobs. My initial thought was “WHERE IS EVERYTHING!?”, but now that I’ve looked at it for a while it doesn’t scare me any longer. There will be no upgrade-induced nightmares tonight.

If you haven’t upgraded yet, do it! Upgrading Wordpress used to scare the life out of me and I would postpone it into eternity, but it really isn’t that bad. Really.

Guess what it is?

The theme is a work in progress, the CSS is mostly just a slightly altered version of the previous theme. I was just messing around in Photoshop, postponing the inevitable moment when I will have to pick up my books and write an essay on the Roman expansion, and the header image (or masthead, as they seem to be called these days) just happened.

Also, yesterday’s post theme will be a somewhat regular feature here. It’s not meant for any sort of entertainment, but more so that when I have one of those days when I just want to curl up and stay asleep all day, I can browse that category and remember that everything isn’t always crap, and then maybe you won’t have to read yet another whiny post from me.

When I first started blogging, it wasn’t called blogging. It was just called “keeping an online diary”, and most of us did it manually. When I say “us”, I refer to the people I knew who did such things at the time. After a while, I, like so many others, moved over to using such technological wonders as Diaryland and Blogger, and eventually Greymatter (which later evolved into b2).

But then rumours began circulating of this new, wonderful blogging platform that had surfaced. Wordpress was the name, and enhanced blogging was the game. Slow as I am to catch onto new things, it took me a while to make the move over to Wordpress, and when I did, it wasn’t complete - I still made all of my pages outside Wordpress. But I loved it. Oh, how I loved it. So much that I eventually decided to take a chance and have Wordpress run my entire site.

Then came the hate.

Template tags, permalink structures, the Loop. It made my head spin, my hands curl into fists and my temperature rise on every occasion I had to deal with these things. And today, today was no exception. I’m just glad I went to bed when I did last night, instead of staying up to finish it and see the new theme launched. Because even though I thought that the only things missing were mere details, little things that I had just overlooked, I was wrong, oh so wrong. I’ve spent large portions of today trying to fix things, and I have to admit that I do not understand what has been the “make or break” solution to many of my problems, but you know what? I don’t care right now. Because it works.

And so I can once again say to Wordpress: I love you. But don’t you dare mess with my archives again, or I’ll have to smack yo ass, in the non-sexy way.

My very first homemade almost-purely-css layout! I’ve worked on it since Monday, when I realised that the very edited version of Blix wasn’t going to work for me. I’ve borrowed a lot of inspiration from Blix on this one though, so mad props to Sebastian Schmieg for that.
It still needs a little bit of work here and there, but I’m getting there, and I’m pretty sure everything should function properly now.
Again, let me know if something’s completely odd and out of place. :)