As these things usually do, the notion has struck me at a time when my access to a computer is going to be restricted for a few days. I am going to to try to hold on to that motivation and actually see it through, though. I’ve had a bit of a rough time this year. Work has had its usual high levels of stress and aggravation. My husband caught a bad case of pneumonia back in January. The 103F fever, scary shaking chills kind of pneumonia. He’s doing well now but is still very tired. I found out yesterday after having some small troubles breathing on Monday night that now I have a mild case of pneumonia. I don’t know if I can blame him for it but I can joke about it. We have plans for this weekend that I really don’t intend to back out of.

Throughout all of it I’ve not really been making time to do things I enjoy and have instead been sort of simply existing. Even my 365 project, which I was so gung ho about a few weeks ago, is fizzling. I missed yesterday and I don’t know that I can make myself take one more bland and completely uninspired photo just so that I can say “Hah! I have a photo for today.” I would much rather put time and effort into finding and taking photos like this:

Opportunities like that don’t come along every day, though. And I know that one has to get out and look for those opportunities but I don’t think I can do that right now.

I am going way off topic. This is what happens when I don’t really have a subject in mind, start writing late in the evening, and then realize that it’s much later in the evening and that I have many, many things to do before I sleep. So. I’m sick but hopefully getting better. Technical things will be going on for echodrift.com over the next few days. DNS servers will be changing so I will wait until everything is settled to start updating again. Updating is something I do fully intend to do. Lots to do this weekend and I’m not ready for it yet.

I do have a post planned to talk about the strangely large list of TV shows I’m currently watching. Instead of working on it, though, I watched some of said shows. Oops. Instead, have a picture from today:

It definitely looks better on black. Speaking of photos, my 365 project is going OK so far. I’m up to Day 52. I still have decided what to do with my photoblog. I’m about to decide that I want to just find a way to include them here. Wonder if I can work that into the current layout…

However, shortly after this window began I found myself unable to access the site. I went to bed thinking surely it would be back up in the morning. It was not. As instructed I sent an inquiry to their support email account. An email account what was on a server affected by the maintenance. I thought that a little odd at first and it has turned out to cause a bit of a problem with emails being delayed for several hours.

I was finally able to get in contact with a member of their support staff through Twitter of all things. It turns out that HTTPD was off when the servers (at least, the one I’m on) were brought up from maintenance and had not been turned back on. Around 2:00 PM EST I received notification that it had been turned on and access to my sites was restored. This resolution came about more than six hours after I first attempted to contact support and over 15 hours since connection was first interrupted.

The notification I received did mention that downtime might last for more than 90 minutes. However, 90 minutes isn’t even close to 15 hours. Finally, everything appears to be functioning properly.

Also regarding WordPress and PHP, I cannot for the life of me figure out why it does not like my contact form the way I have it set up. It was all going swimmingly until the information actually validated. After that I just kept getting a “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.” I’ve been looking at that for hours and I’m still not sure what’s going on.

I also cannot figure out why the time isn’t displaying properly on my tweets. It works perfectly on my local copy but for some reason is 6 hours off on the actual site. I really don’t think that has anything to do with the fact that I was testing on WordPress 2.7 but who knows. Reason for that was so that I could find out if this theme would break when I upgrade. I’ll probably be saving that for tomorrow.

Anyway, enough with the bad and on to the good stuff! Back in November I started working on a 2 column layout that had some kind of glowy header. The structure of the layout was OK. However, I couldn’t stand the look of the header and the sidebar just seemed off to me. I ditched that theme and decided to make a 1 column layout instead. Again, the structure was pretty good but it lacked oomph. I say that a lot and I’m sure my husband looks at me like I’ve lost it (again) but it’s hard for me to describe. It was just missing that special something. I did know that I wanted to go with a larger text size and have plenty of white space.

While in this rut of sorts I decided to poke around a few Photoshop tutorials. I found out that either I’m not so great with Photoshop or the version I have is just too outdated. In reality it’s probably a combination of the two. I found PSDTuts article on creating seamless patterns but it wasn’t until I read Natalie Jost’s tutorial on Texture that it finally clicked. The header image you see is a result of that. The texture is actually a combination of a stock paper texture and several of my own photos. The font is Jane Austen. The rest of the credits can be found on the domain page.

Arranging the site was easier than creating the header, believe it or not. I wanted my tweets to be above the rest of the entries because I update that more often than I write entries. Sometimes they even contain meaningful information. I then decided to showcase the latest entry by itself, followed by a list of the 3 most recent posts (excluding the latest post). That took a bit of modification to the Recent Posts plugin that I used but it was well worth it.

Finally, I’ve started to make the site a little more dynamic depending on what type of content is being viewed. The setup I’ve just talked about was mainly for the main page. Post pages do not include tweets or recent posts. Pages have their own set of sub navigation. My to do list includes making the footer dynamic as well.

Overall I’m pleased with the results. For a while I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to make anything work out to my satisfaction. There’s still a few rough edges but like I said, one can only take so much of fiddling with this stuff.

To do list:

• Fix that blasted form mailer, one way or another.
• Tweak more of the content, particularly the “About” section.
• Incorporate a search box.
• Make the footer more dynamic.
• Separate pings/trackbacks from other comments. My current setup becomes rather messy when they are lumped together.
• Polish any other rough edges anyone points out to me. *hint hint*

Make sure you visit the main site if you’re reading just this article!

Edit: Hey if you can see this it means the domain has propagated! Updates will be resuming shortly.

• Margin collapsing is irritating and useful at the same time. Thanks to Becky pointing that site out to me I figured out what I needed to do to fix the part that was irritating me.
• Overflow fixes an issue that I’ve been having much more cleanly than my workaround.
• IE is still the devil. It is way too forgiving of mistakes. It also does things the wrong way, but in a way that makes me think it’s right. I’ve learned, though, that IE is never right.
• It is apparently not acceptable to use <p /> inside a blockquote. One must instead wrap the contents of a blockquote in <p>these tags</p> or the site won’t validate as xhtml strict.
• I hate styling comments most of all.

However, it’s finally done! Things were probably looking rather wonky before as I tried to fix some errors in my template files. All should be well, now. With this theme I was able to incorporate some things I had left out of the first, such as the link to my RSS feed. That as well as a few other things are located in the sidebar under Misc. I couldn’t come up with a better name for that section because it really is miscellaneous. Those icons are from a set that can be found at Vikiworks. Additionally, I found myself using Twitter more than I thought I would and wanted to include more tweets. My previous footer design didn’t work so well with showing more than one tweet so reason #5 to have a sidebar. (Yes, I did just make that number up.)

I still have some tweaks to do but for now I’m calling it quits. Time to do something other than stare at CSS and XHTML and pull my hair in frustration because the validator doesn’t like my placement of <p/> tags!

(As noted on the domain page I am aware that the footer doesn’t show up in Firefox 2. It’s weird and I’m not sure why.)

Wait. There are no categories for either 365 or echodrift proper. Apparently I’m having some database issues so please excuse every thing that’s broken until I can get it taken care of. I’m in the process of backing everything up and contacting my hosting company. We’ll see how it goes.

Edit: my webhost has corrected some issue with my databases and all appears to be in working order now. What the issue was I have no idea. They never inform me of anything, just reply with a message that says “The issue has been corrected.” How helpful is that? I’m thinking none. Anyway, I really need to stop freaking out about stuff so late at night. I’m sure it’s not good for my health.

It is true that this site has been inactive for a while. Sometime in college it seemed as if there wasn’t enough time for anything and having a website fell by the wayside, a casualty of higher education. Then, a month or so back, a friend started digging through some of her old web design files and posting them on LiveJournal. That prompted me to find all of my old things and put together Once as a place to house them. A growing interest in photography produced 365. Designing these sites seemed to have once again kindled my interest in design and blogging as well, thus sparking the renewal of echodrift.com

And so, after several days of working on the site, here it is. It’s still a little rough around the edges but I prefer to think that a website is always a work in progress. I don’t exactly plan to update every single day, nor will I apologize for a lapse in updates.

That’s all for now, I suppose. I have a bowl of yummy Snickers ice cream to devour.