Testing this out since I don’t do much with this blog anymore. Block with an image? This isn’t exactly intuitive. I had to poke around before I could figure out to get the text to wrap around this image. And if I don’t have enough text, the image will barge into the next block on the screen. This is kind of derpy if you ask me… Never mind. That was just old, bad code. Fixed it!

Bigger text? In a blue box?

Writing text around this image to see how it will work this time. Seems to add formatted and aligned text around an image, the ‘block’ has to start its life as an image ‘block’. If it starts as a paragraph block and you add the image after, you are constrained to the text aligning to the bottom of the image only and not next to it like on this one… And I can’t seem to find whether you could edit a paragraph block to make its text wrap around the image like on an image block.

Now, let’s see how this presents on the front end.

But, no color settings on a Heading. Hmm…

This is just weird and will take some getting used to… And apparently the text I added in the blue box – hello bad line height on a constrained width section! I’ll have to figure out if that is something that I’d have to account for in the design’s CSS, or what.

*Looks at date of previous post*

So, yeah. Almost eight years since my last post. Oops.

Anyway, the title for this entry is regarding my decision to move away from WP. I’m rather tired of having to constantly make sure everything is updated practically every day, especially since I don’t update very often (obvious train, all aboard!). So I will be moving the content here to something else as soon as I can get the new CMS coded up for it.

On the very slim chance that anyone still reads my blog, or even smaller chance that anyone even has any backlinks here (aside from my own occasional backlink in comments), the URLs will change very slightly, specifically for the individual entries, and for any archives I can manage to create. I thought about doing 301 redirects, but… as I doubt anyone is still linking to individual entries, and since my SEO is probably shot anyway, I see no reason not to start ‘fresh’, even if the posts are old. I may even start posting again, not sure on that just yet. I’ll also pare down the bloglist after that, as I’m sure many of the links lead to sites that probably don’t exist anymore.

I’ll be doing the same thing at my ‘raisingagirl.com’ site also. New designs will be in hand for both (mobile ready – something that helped tank any bit of SEO I may have had), and a CMS that is far less likely to have a giant target painted on its back. It’s one I’ve used in the past on other sites, and while it is upgraded fairly consistently, it’s not as constant as WP’s updates have been as of late, so if I fall behind it shouldn’t be as huge of a deal as it would be for WP to fall behind.

So, like the title… Out with the old, in with the new.

Yeah, just what I need – one more place to have to keep up with. LOL

This one is intended for my side biz, for my jewelry.  Actually I already have a link to it here, except it used to be my e-commerce site.  I switched things around over the weekend, moved the e-commerce pages to a different folder (essentially making it invisible unless I give a direct link), and put the new blog on the main directory.

I created both an Artfire Studio (basic for now) and an Etsy shop, where I’ll eventually start posting items for sale – jewelry, polymer clay beads, etc..  The links to both are at the top of the page on that blog.  I am also going to try out a plug-in I found for wordpress which allows one to host an e-commerce solution straight from the WP blog.

Technically I could re-list some of the stuff I had up previously at my e-commerce site, but I’d like to re-take the photos of a bunch of them with better lighting and backdrop and whatnot, before I do that.   Plus I’m also trying to work on some polymer clay stuff to be able to sell as well.   Once that is all ready I’ll put up another post here, as well as at the new blog, letting anyone who still drifts by here, know about it.

I know I’ve lost a lot of readers (geeze, do I even still have any at all? LOL) due to my extremely sporadic posting and even less frequent visitation and commenting at other blogs… And that’s ok with me, to be honest. It’s nothing less than I deserve for slacking like that.  I’ll just have to work on posting more often, either here or at the other blog, and trying to visit other blogs.  Unfortunately with the micromanagement at work looking over my shoulder for claims of excessive slacking there, i.e. surfing too much, it’s become even more difficult to do much of what I used to do from work – which was read others’ blogs and such.  And because I’d rather work on things like, you know, building up a stock of jewelry and whatnot when I’m at home, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for blog surfing and posting on my own blog… Except when I’m in a creative funk, of course.

Talk about being spread thin. 

We see these all over the place where I live. Short, tall, skinny, wide, no arms, dozens of arms… Did you know it is illegal do do any damage to these plants, even if you own one? You cannot just go out and dig one up out of the desert and plant it in your yard, not only because of how large and heavy saguaros are, but even if they’re teeny tiny and could put it in a small pot, if you have one without having purchased it through a licensed grower, you can find yourself in some very hot water.

If you decide to shoot one full of bullet holes in a drunken stupor, and get caught, you will be fined. I think you can even be fined if you hit one accidentally with your car!

Edited 3/6/2017: AcoBox doesn’t seem to exist anymore, so I found another image to use instead.

Anyway, I just thought I would try out a new service I found via some other bloggers’ postings about a site that you can find licensed pictures where you can link to the blog images free for your blogs. I like this idea – I like being able to post photographs on my blog without the hassle of having to upload them somewhere, not to mention doing any resizing and optimization beforehand – this place does it all for you! AcoBox.com

Whew.  That seemed to go off with only a minor hitch, which was easily corrected.  You probably may not notice much of a change from your perspective, but that is the way it should be.  All of the changes happened “behind the scenes”, so what I see when I work in the admin panel of WordPress is completely different now.  I have not tinkered with a lot of the changes yet but so far I HAVE installed a plug in from within the admin panel – whereas before I had to download them manually and install them, so I really really like this new feature.  It is going to save quite a bit of space on my computer hard drive now if I don’t have to download everything!  Although I wonder if it saves it on my server as a zip or if it unzips everything as it is storing it to my host’s server?  I will have to look into that.

Anyway, so far i like what I am seeing and am glad this went smoothly… Now to upgrade my other blog. 🙂

I am going to attempt to upgrade to WP 2.7 shortly.

I hope all goes well… If not, I hope I can get things back to normal without a lot of headache.

So if you visit this site and see a huge mess of HTML or nothing at all, well… Come back in a few and see if things are back to normal.  I am hoping after this upgrade I don’t have to deal with manual upgrades anymore.  I am looking forward to that for sure.

I’m giddy, but I can’t install it until I get home!!  Agh!

Unfortunately I did not install it using my host’s autoinstaller, I installed it manually myself, so I have to download everything and unzip and back up stuff, blah blah, and then upload it to my host before I can try it out.  I’d try installing WP from my host but then I’d have to install all my plug-ins and get everything updated just the way I had it before and that would be a huge PITA… so I’ll just update it manually later.  I think one of the features in 2.7 is being able to upgrade WP remotely like how their plug-ins update, which I am especially intersted in since I did not use my host’s installer.  Not only that but often my host is a little behind on the updates, so, say this update came out today, but my host will not get it for a few more days, if not a week or more.

Drat!! I just realized my husband and I have a show to go to tonight, and we won’t even be home until bedtime, so I won’t be able to update until tomorrow at the earliest. AAGHHH!!! 

Maybe if I have enough time I’ll see if I can update it via my remote connection to home… 

Whew.  That was a lot of hard work.  There are still some minor tweaks I need to add, and I need to fix my adsense widget, but I think this is good.

I decided to make the links in the sidebar pink so they’ll stand out a bit more and they kind of go with the periwinkle color I have for my background.  I may move around some more widgets until I get the sidebars balanced out better.  But I think for the most part I’m done… Now that I have a general idea of how these get put together I’ll probably work on making one for my other blog, probably the same layout but with different graphics.

The only coding I did was tweaking the CSS (a lot) to get the look I wanted, and a teeny bit of the HTML (to get the header and the navigation bar)… The rest of the code, the inner workings of the template, was already put together in a “blank” created by some genius person at WPThemerkit.com. Absolute genius, I tell ya.  Granted one does need to know a bit of HTML and a good amount of CSS to get the templates looking the way you want, but having the rest of the guts of the template already written is just priceless.  There are some minor things missing (like a date stamp on all the posts on the main index), but I can figure out where to add that later.

Now I just have to wonder how much of my template is going to break when WordPress finally releases version 2.7, which I am highly anticipating, by the way, for much of the “behind the scenes” changes that are supposed to be happening, to the admin panel.

I am implementing a new template that I made, please bear with me while I make some more tweaks to get it looking better… I only had one sidebar before and now there are two so I need to move things around, plus I need to get a smaller EC widget as the one I have is too wide for the sidebars I have…

I’ve noticed that some commenters have been leaving multiple links in their comments, and that is fine, except I am seeing that they are not links, which is not going to help you get back links.

I don’t know if something is happening with my comment script (please let me know if this is the case), or if people are just forgetting how to format the links.  If it is the latter, then here is how to format them so that you will have backlinks:

<a href=”http://www.thisismywebpage.com”>This is My Web Page</a>

Again, please let me know if you are putting them in this way but for some reason that is not how they are showing up once you click submit.  Otherwise, use the above formatting, replacing the url with your own of course, to ensure that your links will show up in the comments and will provide you with backlinks.

This concludes our HTML tip for the day.