Domestic Geek

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 remember being able to save my MovableType files as external docs on my server so I wouldn't have to edit them in the the program's editor. It's one of the things I've always been meaning to see if it could be done in Expression Engine because I hate working on my templates in the editor with a passion. I think it's one of the reasons I haven't really been working on my sites. I'd much rather work in BBEdit (my mac text editor of choice) and have the proper outline format and be able to see the color coding. Makes it a heck of a lot easier to spot problems, let me tell you! Instead of just figuring it out a long time ago, I've been copying from the editor, pasting into BBEdit, making changes, copying it back into the editor — not the most efficient workflow. Anyway, I was working on couple of friends' Wordpress templates the last few days and I was tinkering with their files on my own test server via my FTP program (Transmit) and BBEdit. So much easier! I decided today I was going to figure out how to make that happen in EE or I was going to dump the platform.

Fortunately, there is indeed a way to Save Templates as Text Files. The hardest part was figuring out what my server path was. I uploaded a page called pathinfo.php into the root of the site with this code: <?php phpinfo(); ?> and loaded the page. Down at the bottom was my server path. Yay! So, now I can code directly from BBEdit via Transmit. It is done and one more thing I've been putting off for so long is crossed off my list. Now it's late, but I'll get to working on my new design first thing in the morning.

I saw this quiz on somebody's site a few mintues ago while I was surfing around. Like I said, confirms what I already know. I know I need to get some professional help. I just wish I could afford it.

Disorder	Your Score
Major Depression:	High
Dysthymia:	Very High
Bipolar Disorder:	High-Moderate
Cyclothymia:	Moderate
Seasonal Affective Disorder:	High
Postpartum Depression:	N/A
Take the Depression Test

I can't find what is wrong! I've opened up a test page, stripped out everything but the nav menu, the header, the posts and the footer and IT IS STILL SLOW TO LOAD! WTF??!!!

There are no javascripts, nothing from the outside, no dynamic headers, no CSS.

Obviously I've mistakenly changed some preference in my admin panel, but what? This is going to take a lot longer to fix than I thought. Hmph.

OK, found another one that's interesting. This is the last one of these for a bit. I don't want to make this place all quizzes, all the time. I thought some of the statements in this one were eerily accurate. Especially the taking a step back from the world, that my creativity keeps me from getting things done (I have so many ideas and thoughts that I just can't seem to focus) and the brilliant but not finding my niche. It's all so true it is a little freaky.