Domestic Geek

I used to be really good at web coding and design. That almost 10 year stint I did at the print shop and not using the skills made me freaking rusty. I thought when I got my current job that I'd be able to start getting them back in shape as in the interview they seemed really pumped that I had web skills. Well, they had hired a web company before I got there and I have no access to the back end (something that I can't seem to make them understand). It's irritating when they'd ask me to try to do something on the web site and I'd have to explain again and again that they'd have to call the developer as I had no password to access the core of their site.

For reasons I can't go into on a public forum, I need to get my skill set back. My poor site here has been broken because I hadn't upgraded EE in so long that when Marcus upgraded his servers to the latest PHP, everything here was broken. I'm back up enough that I hope this will post...we'll see here in a bit. PHP has changed, Expression Engine has changed, even HTML changed (I have no experience whatsoever with HTML5). It's going to be a challenge, but I will relearn all this.

ETA: OK, my little mood guys are broken, but at least I can post. That's a start...

When I upgraded my Expression Engine install to 2.x a while back, my iBlogger app on my phone no longer worked. I was bummed, but not overly concerned as I had fallen off my blogging wagon anyway. Well, I've been itching to blog again, especially when I'm stuck at work waiting for Marcus to finish his work. The last thing I want to do is post to my personal blog from my work computer. Even though I'm on really good terms with the IT guy, I don't want to cross that line. It is bad enough that I surf Ravelry after my shift is over.

I was doing some research one night while I was waiting because I really need to fix some structural things that broke when I upgraded last. I have a new upgrade waiting to install, so I decided now is the time to work on this.

Anyway, I came across a link for an app that is supposed to be EE 2 compatible and I bought it.

Except for a small hiccup because I misread the path where modules need to be installed, it is working so far! I'll read the documentation in more depth tomorrow to see what all I can do, but it is working and I'm feeling quite proud of myself.

On that note, I'm heading off to bed. Now, sleeping might be another story as the construction on I-225 is in full gear again tonight. You would think there would be noise regulations that would prohibit how loud they are being.

One of my goals of 2010 was to purge the house of unnecessary stuff. Well, it occurred to me (while I was sick with Pneumonia) that more than my house is cluttered. I need to start purging my whole life.

One reason I don't blog very much anymore is I've got too much on my mind and no clear outlet to get it out of there and into writing. I currently have 8 blogs set up at the moment (for various purposes). I rarely write on any of them. When I do have something I want to post, where do I put it? Sometimes I want to share to more than one audience, but I don't want the hassle of writing it more than once. More often than not, I'd just decide to throw a quick blurb out on Twitter or Facebook or not to bother writing at all. The problem with this scenario is that my blog is no longer a chronicle of my life. Many times I've referenced this place to pin down a date when some life event occurred. Lately, I've been finding that I never wrote about many important things. Have you tried going back through a Twitter or Facebook account to find specific information? Big old pain in the butt!

Most of the blogs are using Wordpress as the CMS and I'm truly finding it to be a pain. It's like the Microsoft of the blog publishing world. So many people use it that it is the target for hackers and evil-doers. A couple of my oldest blogs had been infiltrated by spammers. I try to keep the software up to date on my personal improvement and craft blogs, but it gets to be so tiresome to have to update all the freakin' time. Then I'd have to keep working with the themes because sometimes the updates broke my theme's functionality. Then I found out from Marcus that my Wordpress blogs put strain on our webserver. One time he even took all of my WP blogs offline because some errant code in a theme was crashing the server. All of these problems aren't really worth being able to use some of the cool plug-ins that drew me to using Wordpress in the first place.

I decided a couple of days ago that I'm over having all these useless blogs. I started researching how to get the content I wanted to save from these WP blogs into this one (which has always been using EE). These are the best instructions I found for importing from Wordpress to Expression Engine. Last night I decided to go for it. I edited the final text files to fix image links and delete extra crap or duplicate posts that I didn't want to import. Except for a little wonkiness with the categories, everything seemed to come over just fine. I do have one blog left still using Wordpress (my 101 in 1001 blog) and I'm hoping that after my days off next week, that one will be migrated over, too. Now I can concentrate on this blog. Without being mentally overwhelmed, I can concentrate on fixing this design and begin posting on a regular basis. Maybe I'll even get some of my coding skills back. When Marcus gets home, I'm going to ask him to delete some database tables. A couple of domains will be let go when they come up for renewal.

The purging has begun.

I've been slowly trying to get DomesticGeek.com configured so that it can go live on December 1. It sucks when you've got your blog home set up the way you like it and can't remember every step and configuration you made to get it to the point you are now on a new server on an updated version of your CMS. Marcus got me EE 1.6 a while back and I installed it over there, figuring I'd be up and running there soon. Ha! All those little tweaks I made here and there over the years are now a necessary part of my blog operation and I can't remember what I did or how I got there. I'm documenting everything from here on out.

Man, it's only a little after 8 and I'm pooped. Dad and I got our shopping done. It was a bit of a pain, though. We headed out at 7:30 am and thought the store would be empty. The King Soopers over in Green Valley Ranch is the one at which he likes to do our feast shopping. The place was full of shoppers. Also, either people on their night crew called in or their truck got in late, because there was merchandise all over the place that needed to be put on the shelves. They were out of Honeysuckle White turkeys, so we left turkeyless. Dad had to open up a carton on a cart to get me some cream cheese for the cheesecake. The bake aisle was so jammed up that you couldn't even get a cart down it. I went out later and after hitting a couple of King Soopers and not finding a turkey, gave in and went to a Safeway. It still wasn't as big as I'd liked (I usually cook a bird upwards of 25 lbs to get the most leftovers possible), but it was a HW and was 20 lbs. I'll deal.

We got part of the Christmas lights up, but there were two sets that are toast. I'll have to pick up a couple of strings at Hobby Lobby this week so I can finish up.

I haven't started my table runner yet. I can't find the fabric I know I have that was to be the background color or the fabric I was going to use for the backing. I think I might know where they are, but I'm too pooped to look tonight. I also found out the blade in my rotary cutter is super dull. While I'm at Hobby Lobby, I'll have to get a replacement blade.

Since I can barely keep my eyes open, I'm off to bed. It's going to be a busy week and I'm not going to skimp on sleep and risk getting sick.

Just a heads up that things are going to be wonky as I get my Pink October theme back up. Silly me thought I had backed up my theme right before I changed it for Blogathon, but I neglected to grab the style sheet. D'oh. Fortunately, I have a backup from last April, I just need to mesh the right hex color codes in. Be patient. I also promise this theme will not be here for the whole next year.

UPDATE: OK, we are officially PINK for October! The only problems remaining are those that I've always been too lazy to fix (like my comments sidebar). The whole purpose obviously is to bring awareness that October is National Breast Cancer month and to promote education about the disease itself. Head over to the Pink for October site for details and to sign up (once they fix the submission form). Of course, you can still go pink without signing up for the site.