tidbits: “now where did I put that?” edition

A quick roundup of random thoughts between tearing up the house to find where I left my brain…

A new giveaway is up on the Cleveland Handmade page, a very pretty fused glass necklace from glasfuzion. Entering is really simple, so go do it!

I did end up having to change my WordPress theme after all. I loved my time with Adam Freetly’s widgetized version of DePo Clean, but it got really glitchy after my latest WordPress upgrade, and I never was able to figure out how to make the photos do what I wanted them to do, so it was time to move on. I present you with my own customized version of Clean Home by Bryan Helmig. Please let me know if you notice anything weird about the way it acts. Several users have posted on WordPress forums about problems with comments links, but I haven’t come across any in my testing. I’m not thrilled about the text button used to submit comments, but that will have to wait for another day.

Our Cleveland Handmade appearance on Kickin’ It with Kenny on Fox 8 has been confirmed for Friday, July 31, sometime around 7:20 a.m. Just waiting for a call back from the intern to figure out the exact details.

I’m glad to have the rain, but please make it stop before my show on Saturday.

Speaking of the show, I was beyond thrilled to see a full-page ad for the Avon Lake Summer Market in the WestLife newspaper (and I’m assuming it ran in the Avon Lake Press, too), complete with all the participants’ names and a brief description of what they have. This show just gets bigger and better every year.

And why is it that I always get new ideas for products and displays mere days before a major show, when there just isn’t enough time to pursue them?

Where the Hell Is Matt?

This video is making the rounds, but if you haven’t seen it yet, take a couple of minutes, put some joy into your day, and ponder the power of serendipity.

okey-dokey

I’m still not entirely sure what happened with that little glitch in my sidebar, but the answer seemed to be switching themes. Isn’t the new DePo-Clean theme lovely? It suits my love of clean and streamlined things, and I love the Flickr plugin that puts the little pictures up top there. I’ve been a fan of Derek Powazek‘s for a loooooong time, and I am grateful, too, to Adam Freetly for making it widget-ready. There are still a few tweaks to be done, but it will do for the time being.

more weirdness

And now we can add to that last post that all of a sudden my photo, Etsy mini, and Flickr badge are now all missing from my sidebar. I’m just not equipped to deal with this today.

electronic weirdness

Not sure what is going on, but there seems to be some kind of capricious, selective electronic vortex surrounding my house.

I have been trying to get to marthastewart.com for three days now to access a couple articles of interest, but it will not let me get there. I get a “server not responding” error, no matter what browser I use. I have not found any other website that behaves this way. My husband tried last night from his PC laptop and his Palm and wasn’t able to make a connection either, although he was able to connect from the same laptop at work this morning. I’ve asked a few other people to try from assorted computers and locations, and they can all get in fine. I’ve cleared my cache and cookies; unplugged everything from the cable modem, router, and Vongage box and let them all rest for 20 minutes; restarted my computer — all to no avail.

Now, the really weird thing is that I can get to some things on the subdomain blogs1.marthastewart.com (Martha Blog, Dinner Tonight, and Bluelines [oh, alas for the demise of the printed Blueprint]), but not others (Bride’s Guide).

What little I understand of my net search results seems to point to something in the router’s firewall (although the site was working just fine last week), but I know next to nothing about networking and firewalls and am terrified to tackle this on my own lest I really mess something up (my net access is critical to my business, whereas access to Martha specifically is not). I’ll just have to wait until my IT guy can take a look at it.

Then, early this morning, my phone made a really weird beep and all of a sudden I had messages — eight of them, going back to late last week, all of them new to me. But in the meantime, I have received a few calls and checked voicemail. I don’t get a lot of calls, so it didn’t occur to me that I might be missing any. Apparently I was.

If I’m wearing a tinfoil hat next time you see me, you’ll know why.

all hail…

the K2 template. I think it’s going to make my life a lot easier. And the blah green of the last template was bringing me down.

impatience

Argh. I’ve finally come across an incompatibility with Safari that I just can’t get around and have made the decision to switch completely over to Firefox. Of course, I am doing this on a day when I don’t have a ton of extra time to dive in and learn Firefox’s own quirks.

whew. again.

It took all morning, but I think I have made the hosting switcheroo work, finally. My old host was charging too much, and their customer service was going downhill fast, so when I learned that the Dreamhost account we got for the wedding website could also host my other domains at no extra charge, and that what Dreamhost charges for hosting all of my sites, with tons of extra features, is less than the charge for just one of my other bare-bones websites at the other place, well, that’s what they call a no-brainer.

The only real downside is that I was unaware that my old hosting account was up for renewal and had very little notice, so I jumped in completely unprepared. Word to the wise: If you need to move a WordPress installation, take advantage of the Export function on your existing WP installation before updating the DNS servers and setting up the new installation. I thought simply copying the files would be enough, but it wasn’t.

I am told that there may be some “issues” (and I hate that word being used instead of “problems”) with lost e-mail until the DNS change finishes propagating, so if you send me a message and don’t get a response, you might want to resend in a day or two.

%&^*ing spammers

I’ve turned on comment moderation, which I hope will stop the comment spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.