Domestic Geek

I give up. I've spent a good couple of weeks trying to tweak this theme I picked for my craft blog and I'm starting over. I'm going to take the time and learn to build a good theme from scratch and stop wasting time trying to fix something that has so many problems. That's the problem I've found with most Wordpress themes out there — the person making it only has the most rudimentary understanding of css, html, wordpress tags, etc. and he/she pieces together something and it kind of works. The problem comes in when someone like me tries to add stuff and their jacked up code causes me all sorts of frustrations. Especially when the theme says it is 2.0 compliant, yet I find deprecated tags in there. Grrr. Oh, well. It has been a great learning experience. So, it will still be a bit before it goes live. Sorry.

The good news is I finally had some inspiration for a theme for this site last Friday at work. I've been working on that and hopefully I'll have it ready to go by next weekend. I really didin't want to have my "Pink for October" theme in place when I do the Blogathon at the end of the month. Ooh, that reminds me that today is July 1st and registrations were supposed to open up for it. Watch the blog here for news about that soon and when you can start pledging support for me. Mark you calendars that the event is Saturday, July 28th.
Edit: Registrations not yet open, but they will be soon. I'm so excited I can't stand it!

In case you've been wondering why I haven't been posting as much the last few days, I'm in the process of finally setting up my craft blog that I've been wanting to do forever. Marcus even set me up a subdomain last December and that's as far as I got with it. I really want a place where I can chronicle my craftiness and hopefully inspire me to actually finish some of my many projects.

I'm using WordPress as the CMS so that I can become more familiar with how it works, so I've had a lot of work to do. It's using a theme that's not my own, but downloaded from the Wordpress themes site. I hate using canned themes, but I really just want to get this thing going. There's so much to learn because I've never seriously blogged using WP and only have a basic understanding of it. I can't wait to learn about all the different plugins and figure out this widget stuff.

So, help me out, dear readers! If you use Wordpress, what plugins/widgets must I absolutely have?

I'll post the URL later today when I've got it ready to go.

I just found out that Joelle from Moxie Design Studios is blogging again at Tenth Muse. Man, her blog hiatus took forever and I've missed her horribly. Isn't that weird that you can miss somebody that you've never met? Anyway, she and her business partner at Moxie were busy writing a book called The IT Girl's Guide to Blogging with Moxie. It's available for preorder on Amazon as well as being on my Amazon wishlist. I can't wait to read it. Welcome back, Joelle!

I joined a cool little site the other day called whogets.com. It's a free online sweepstakes game show — absolutely no catches and they promise never to spam you.

After becoming a member, you join contests for a specific prizes ranging in value from $10 – $600. At the end of the semifinal period where any member can join the contest, seven finalists are randomly chosen and the WhoGets community gets to vote for the winner. Some of these prizes are nothing to sneeze at, either. An online friend of mine won a Palm Z22 Handheld yesterday. They have some pretty well-known sponsors for the prizes, too. I'm hoping to get into the final round for a Grind & Brew coffeemaker since our grinder is on the verge of dying.

Anyway, go sign up. You might just win something.

Gah, I hope Marcus gets home soon. I don't know if someone has infiltrated my email account or if someone else's computer with my email addy in it has become a spam zombie, but I've been getting undeliverable email notices for the last couple of hours...lots of them.

Edit: Well, it looks like I ended up getting some sort of trojan or something on the old PC today. It was the zombie. We're not sure if we got it stopped and the machine cleaned good enough, so Marcus just had me pull the network cable on it. Grrr. Stupid spammers. Stupid windows. Stupid me.