echodrift

Things I have learned

What I’ve learned while working on this new design:

• 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.)

Technical Difficulty

One of my plugins for 365 seems to have malfunctioned. As a result none of my pictures have a category. I think that’s the only damage. But… time to go re-categorize 75 posts.

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.

blink… blink… blink…

Ever have that feeling before? You’re sitting there, all ready to type out some amazing post and the cursor just sits there, mocking you. Maybe it’s because this blog is all shiny and new. I think I’ve always found the first post to be the hardest. Once it’s over it doesn’t seem so bad. I could do the whole “Welcome to echodrift.com!! It’s my new blog and personal site that I just reopened after a long period of inactivity. Blah blah blah.” That approach, however, always seems so stiff and overly cheerful.

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.