Domestic Geek

Thanks to a mention from Colleen in a comment, I am now aware that my RSS feed is messed up. I totally screwed up my prior RSS feed and thought going to a default template from the EE site would fix things for now. Apparently, though, if I edit a post for any reason, it shows up more than once in a reader. Great, now I've got to worry about this. Like I've got time to deal with it.

Edit: Also figured out my permalinks were wrong. Weeee. Testing to see if this fixes the problem.

OK, I'm working on my template and I've hit a little snag. I want to do graphical buttons for my navigation menu instead of text, but I can't figure out a picture to represent a couple of them. Obviously, Home is a house, Gallery is a camera, Contact is envelope, but About and Archives have me stumped. A book maybe for archives? Does that make sense. Mind you, when you hover over the button, it will have text of where it goes, but I'm stuck. Disclaimer I'm thinking of moving out of the nav, but if you got a good idea for that one, I'm all ears.

Of course, these may come to me after a good night's sleep. I had a rotten day at work today and my brain is a little muddy from that. I thought I'd be in a better mood once I got out of there, but the heat today just made me cranky.

How can the weekend be over aleady? Man, I am so happy and excited about how my new design is shaping up that I don't even want to go to work today just to play with it. I have, however, discovered that I really suck (for now) at illustrating people. I need to practice that and get better. I can see it in my mind, I just can't quite transfer it to pixels. No worries.

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.