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Please Face the Camera and State Your Name

Registration at RaspberryPaws is now open!

Please register if you read my blog. On the right, under Meta, there is now a “Register” option.
Please email me or comment here if you have problems with the registration.

At some point in the future registration will be required to read and comment here.
I’ve decided that I don’t need current or potential customers, or current or potential employers finding and reading this personal blog of mine. It’s supposed to be a personal blog for my friends to read. For more details as to why, please read this post and comments.

New Feature(s)

My blog now has a little feature where you can subscribe to the comments of a single entry. Because I know you’re all dying to follow the conversation around here. ^_~

I like the feature, though. I use it on other blogs, when it’s offered. Sometimes I ask a question in the comments, or want to see how the author responds to my comment, but I’m just not interested in subscribing the the RSS Comments Feed because I don’t care to read every comment they receive. I only care about ones relevant to posts I care enough about to comment on. ^_^

I’m also considering requiring registration for reading and/or commenting. Gord pulled it off without a hitch. While there’s no one in particular I’m trying to avoid, now that I’m working on a fully public blog, I’d like to make sure my private blog stays private.

New Theme

I have a new WP theme now.

I upgraded this blog to WP 2.3.1 finally, and my old theme didn’t really work with widgets. I’m not entirely sure if I like this one, but it’ll do for now. I’d like to get a nice theme done some day, but I’m not really at the point where I can spend money on a blog layout (who is?).

Google Knows I Exist!

Woo! My site, caitlin-brown.com now comes up third on a Google search for my name! ^_^

Before, if you searched for me, anything actually by me was burried in a mountain of Julie Caitlin Brown stuff.

Didn’t take as long as I thought, either. Cool.

Now, to actually find time to write the tutorials people are asking me for…
(on that note, if anyone has anything like a tutorial they want up on C-B.com for some reason, let me know)

New Layout for Raspberry Paws

Raspberry Paws finally has a new layout! It’s not the ultra-personalized one I’ve always wanted (which did involve both kitten feet and raspberries, incidently), but you’ll notice in the past year that has not been forthcoming. Maybe someday, but until then I at least have a nice looking layout for my blog. I like this one. ^_^ Though if you’ve been keeping track, all of my websites have been green lately. Oh well. Partially because I like greens, but also because two of them use the same OS layout.

I think the wedding.raspberrypaws.com wedding site will eventually be swapped over to purples to match the wedding colours, but I haven’t had time to do that yet either. Those things called “school” and “working to pay rent” keep getting in the way.

I did manage to add-in the new “mood” feature to this layout. The default place for moods to appear is below the time posted, so I had to both move it and make it appear where it does without going in front of/behind the post text. It worked out, so yay! If you’re wondering, no, I didn’t draw those (I wish), it’s just a free mood set.

As always, if anyone’s browser has a problem with this layout, or antyhing else, please let me know. Though I think this one should render properly on both Firefox and IE.

Grrr… Layouts :P

So I’m trying to pull together a wedding website. Kinda lame, I know, but at least I don’t want one of those shitty pre-made fill-in-the-blanks and pay $100+ to some company for it sites you see, so I’m trying to do it on my own. Yes, I know this blog doesn’t even have a real layout yet. So sue me.
At the very least, it’ll help keep me organized, plus be a good place to put registry links, and maps/directions for our not-from-Kincardine guests.

I’m using WordPress, because I know the system and I think the backend is flexible enough to do the things I want, and in theory will take less work than building a plain HTML site from the ground up.

The trouble is the layout. I found a great open-source no-frills layout that I love and would be easy to tweak to have the look I want. Trouble is it doesn’t work in IE. Like, at all.
Not that I’m planning on having a big audience for the site or anything, and I’m pretty sure none of my friends use IE anymore, but I’d been hoping to send around the link to my family, most of whom don’t even know what a “browser” is, let alone that there are other ways to view the internet than Internet Explorer.
Firefox = Good. (and still looks good in smaller resolutions)
IE = Bad.
IE less than 1024×768 = Terrible.

Anyone happen to know any good WordPress themes that look roughly like this, that has cross-browser compatability?
Basic requirements:
3 column
100% width, not fixed
Clean, simple to alter

I’ve found a few that are kinda close, but they’d all require almost too much editing to be worth it. With this one, basically a colour change and a few images gives me exactly what I want.

Grr.

Sidenote: I may just end up using that layout over here in my real blog, though. I like it. Does anyone who reads this blog, at all, use Internet Explorer? Anyone? Beuller? Beuller?

Ew.

Ugliest. Blog. Ever.

But it’s full screen and resizes, so hopefully I can tweak it so it’s no longer hideous. I think the comments even work properly in this theme. At least they are not being duplicated. Possibly my wish to not require an email address will work too.

Announcements and Changes

As some of you probably know, Josh and I are now officially engaged! ^_^
The wedding is set for September 23rd, 2006 and will be held in Kincardine. Save the date!
It’s going to be pretty small, only about 50 people at the ceremony, but that’s how we want it.

We’re having the ring custom made, so we don’t have it yet (thus no pics), but for now I have a silver “engagement necklace” with a little amethyst pendant. It’s too hot in here right now to drag out the camera and set up lights to actually get a good shot of it, so no photo of that yet either. Forthcoming.

I got tired of Geeklog, so I’ve switched to WordPress. I like WordPress better; it’s easier to manage on the admin side of things, and easier to customize on the public side of things. ^_^ I managed to snag all my old posts from the geeklog blog, but I wasn’t able to port over the comments, unfortunately.

This is probably not the final layout, though, since I still don’t like fixed-width layouts, but for now this’ll do. I like how I did the top image. ^_^
It works best in Firefox, I think IE messes it up a little bit. Do any of you even still use IE?

Ii tried to make it so an email address is not required to post a comment, but I haven’t been able to get rid of the text that says (required). If someone could let me know if it’s still requiring an email address to post a comment, that would be super, thanks.
That didn’t work, but I think it’s just the theme I happened to choose. :p
It’s now set back to needing an email address.
It also apparently likes to duplicate comments. Whee.