Archive for the ‘Blog Ideas’ Category

Hrm, not bad.

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

So I’m working on a template for a client and I have to say, I like it way too much.¬† So much so that I think I’m going to change a few key aspects of the design and then use it as the new template on acidgloss.net.¬† It looks more like a CNN kind of template, and there is one available for like $90 but when you know how to code with heavy CSS and then work it into WordPress, why pay $90?¬† I’m getting like $150-$200 for the job but that’s only because there are a lot of function changes and I’m also going to integrate a forum into it.

During the process I took a while of poking around the net to figure out a way to get each entry to have it’s own individual post icon, something like what you can do with LiveJournal.¬† There’s no official “plugin” for it, it’s really dependent upon a template file and “Custom Fields” I haven’t used that option in so long it’s unreal.¬† Either way I have figured it out.¬†¬† I did shoot the idea over to Sean though.¬† I know exactly what I’d like the plugin to do – there just isn’t one available.

To give a quick break down, if you use LiveJournal you should be able to understand where I’m coming from.¬† When you’re posting an entry there should be some kind of a drop-down menu or browse button for images you’ve uploaded¬†onto your server via WordPress.¬† Now typically this is a “Browse” option but that’s for pasting the icon directly into the entry, I want it to be part of the index.php template file itself.

When you’ve chosen your image and published your entry it will appear wherever you pasted the include file.¬† Now you can do this with the custom field, but the option it doesn’t have is the ability to automatically set a default image to the entries that don’t have a related images, and I don’t want to have to go back through 2 years worth of archives to paste the image into the article – you know?.¬† I’m sure there’s a way to just rewrite the default WP custom_meta code but who knows.¬† I have asked Sean to consider creating the plugin so that he can add it to his list, and I’ll certainly pimp the hell out of it because I think it’s a decent idea.

Note: I just had him come in and write up a quick if-statement and the rest is cake.¬† Now I’m just going to have to come up with a default image.¬† I’ll have to play around in photoshop for a little while for that one.

So I’ve been busy with that and right now I’m hoping to get a few things completed so I can take a shower and get out of here.¬† I have some errands to run, Bella’s out of food and I want to stop into a few stores to check in on my applications.¬† I’m also hoping to apply at the beauty supply shop down here but that’s because of my experience with it while I was at my grandmothers store.¬† This place is kind of like¬†a Sally’s but they don’t have a lot of Sally’s specific supplies that I use on a regular basis.¬† Either way they’re over loaded with hair products so it wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway.

So I guess I should get my ass in gear.

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Much needed relaxing evening

Friday, July 20th, 2007

We wound up ordering out for dinner tonight because I’d forgotten to take some stuff out of the freezer to defrost so pizza seemed to be the only option. So while I sat here and got some work done, answering emails and what not, Sean went out to pick up the pizza and on his way back got the mail to find out that “Out to Sea” a movie he’d put on his blockbuster queue a while ago, showed up tonight. We plopped down in front of the TV for a few hours, enjoyed our pizza and laughed our asses off at the movie. Now it’s a little after midnight and we’re both back in the office getting some work done, well – I’m mainly starting on work for when I wake up in the morning. He just does what he does whenever he can, basically.

It’s my goal to at least get a PSD together for another template to put up on blog ideas. I’d like to have maybe four or five big templates – I don’t want to just hand out crappy CSS ones that are quick and simple for someone. I want them to have some kind of a style to them that isn’t really found on freebie templates, and trust me I’ve looked through many databases in order to know the route I’m going to take with these. I should probably boot up photoshop and get to work.

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Very, very close.

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

I’m close to completing another theme. I’m still working on getting hemmingway to work on the first one I was working on but for some reason I came across a color scheme today that I fell in love with and then decided to play from there. I’m also going to go back and alter the templates so that there’s the option for two or three column, I know quite a few people are using three columns more now than in the past considering how much stuff main pages are being loaded with. I’m aware of the fact that there’s something on my sidebar that’s slowing down the loading time but trial and error hasn’t come up with much. I do believe that the blog rolling boxes have something to do with it though.

I’m running out of ideas for themes though, what colors would you like to see on a free template that you haven’t before?

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I’m stuck.

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

I’m not sure why but for some reason I’m having trouble coding up one of the free templates. There’s a lot of functions options to play with for the widgets. I came across an article where you can use multiple widgets on the site and naturally I’m looking into them considering one of the themes has a hemmingway footer and instead of having the user install excess plugins, I’d rather do it through the new WordPress 2.0 setup with the widgets. I know the sidebar one works fine, it’s just creating the other ones for the footer that are growing to be a pain in the ass. I’ve been working on it for most of the day so I could have at least four solid templates to launch with in upcoming weeks.

Shauna, to answer your question, the downloads will be based on acidgloss.net, but I’ll have them located on blog-ideas.net and even curvy-chick.net just to cross link everything.¬† Either way they’ll be easy to find, trust me.

Other than that, it’s been kind of a lazy day. There isn’t really anything interesting going on. A little bit of rain passed through here today but nothing major. There’s nothing on television and I got no cleaning done, other than a few things in the kitchen before I made dinner. I did a roasted chicken with potatoes and broccoli, turned out pretty good but the white meat was a little dry and that makes no sense to me considering I basted the thing about three times during it’s three hour cook time. There’s a lot of left overs, I had to take all of the meat off the bones to put in a bowl. It’s not worth keeping the bones when the important stuff can easily fit into a bowl for convenience. So Bella is covered on food for the next few days, no one really eats left overs. It’ll save me some money too considering her new love of canned chicken is costing me about $30 a week in dog food where regular dog food is only about $0.60 cents per can – she’d prefer human food.

She got sick this morning, she refuses to eat and then throws up and looks for sympathy. So Sean and I were both sitting on the floor kind of forcing a piece of cheese down her throat, It didn’t work and we just wound up going to bed. We woke up a few hours later and she went right for a piece of cheese. Too much of a brat for me, I swear.

Speaking of brats, Princess loves to go through purses and managed to get into mine. All my gum is gone and all of my receipts are ripped to shreds. She did her damage then parked herself on the couch like she could do absolutely no wrong. She also almost took my finger off tonight going after a piece of food, teeth marks and blood to prove it. Vicious little brat, I swear to god.

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Where does it all come from?

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

A few people have asked me how I manage to maintain three blogs and never run out of anything to say. The real trick is that one, I have a creative streak going that never seems to end and two, I use not only my own resources (old entries to work off of, book topics, book ideas, music, etc) but I read other peoples blogs as well. I run a business and technology based blog on acidgloss.net. With all of the hype surrounding new technology these days it’s hard to run out of things to say there. I run my weight-loss blog over on curvy-chick.net, I’m spending every single day working on my diet from portion control to exercise so naturally I’m going to have a constant flow of topics there. Then there’s k.nu, it’s kind of my all-in-one blog. I blog about business, life, dieting, relationships and more.

If you just have one topic in your head then you can flow with it in so many different directions it’s unreal. I’m not the type of person that when something happens my first instict is to blog about it. While it may seem like it, I really don’t sit at my computer all day long, I just type very fast so it’s easy for me to get everything from my head to wordpress without wasting much time at all.

I’m still working on getting blog-ideas.net up and running, Sean has been slacking on programming the administration panel for me but he’s also working on his own stuff at the moment. I can’t interrupt his job just for a project site – you know? But the site is going to have everything from topic ideas to blog templates and even tips and tricks that have brought me to earn over $20,000 from my blog in the last year.

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Keeping myself busy … without much to do.

Monday, June 25th, 2007

I’ve been keeping myself busy by playing around with a few new templates for blog-ideas.net. I’m waiting, rather patiently at this point, for Sean to get started on the back end so I can launch the site. It’s been over a month, it’s basically completed and I absolutely hate being delayed!

I was considering setting up WordPressMU on the site and offering blogs to users looking to get their hands on something different. However, I doubt that would take off to where I’d like it to go. With WordPress powering their own off spring of WordPress.com, and Typekey running both Movable Type and LifeJournal – there’s really no room for a smaller site coming up for more blogs to be thrown on. The problem really is that everyone and their mother has a blog and some people like to sign up on free blog sites just to hold onto the username. I think that sucks, honestly. I’d setup rules where if you don’t post at least 3 entries within the first month – you’re booted and lose the name. I know personal issues can get in the way of some people actually using their sites but there are usernames on Livejournal that I’ve been interested in for YEARS and the owners haven’t touched their account since as early as 2001, it’s kind of unfair to the rest of the community – you know?

I also threw up a new template on curvy-chick.net, I know it’s my third one in like two weeks but I got sick of all the blue that I’m surrounded by these days. It’s bad enough I’m stuck on blue sheets until I can buy a new set for the bedroom. I don’t need it all over my websites as well. I changed it to a pink/gray format and while it looks like complete crap and will more than likely be scrapped for one of the blog-ideas.net freebie templates, at least the blue is gone. I just like using completely CSS based templates as well. Imageless is always the simplest way to go.

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Using blog ideas.

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

I’ve decided that since I’m building a database of blog ideas, I may as well use a couple of them to my advantage. One of the ever-so-funky questions would have to be “Why do tornadoes love to hit trailer parks?”

This may seem like a stupid, let alone offensive question, but it seriously is the truth. With the weather change there have been tornadoes popping up left and right, some hitting area’s that aren’t typically even effected by them. The key thing, however, is most of them actually land right on trailer parks or just mobile home communities in general. I can’t tell you how many red-necks I’ve seen standing in front of a pile of rubble with a southern accent claiming they’s-losts-evrythang.

It’s not as if there’s some kind of magnetic pull that attracts these tornadoes to trailer parks, so what exactly could it be? I’m sure you could come up with a reasonable answer – so what do you think?

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Posted in Blog Ideas, Discussion | 1 Comment »

Happy Tuesday!

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

The sun is slowly starting to set and I’ve only been up for an hour. While everyone else considers 5PM to be hour 17 of the day, I on the other hand consider it to be hour #2 of my day…see what kind of world I’m in? Last night Sean and I watched Bench warmers, tonight we’re going up to Blockbuster to pick up Reno911 if there are actually any left, he should have gone this morning! Oh well, according to him no one rents on Tuesday’s anyway – I just hope that’s actually the case considering all the freaking tourists are down here.

We got a little bored after the movie and wound up playing backgammon online for a little bit. Then after some television we got back to work and that’s when I completed the template for blog-ideas. I still have a lot of email to go through but I’m hesitant because most of them are bitchy clients who I probably never should have put on the servers to begin with. Just recently I got rid of a kid who I’ve hated for years. He signs up, stops payment two months in and then bitches that his account is suspended. He’s done this to me on two domains, he’s now officially blacklisted. Tony loves when I tell him to put that kind of stuff through, lol.

So tonight there’s little plans made, but a lot of work to be done. I have quite a few clients to get back to, I hope to have Reno 911 in my hands sometime soon but that depends on whether or not Sean is going to get off his booty. Once that’s all completed I’m going to start completing the Beta on blog-ideas.net so even if I don’t have the database up and running I can at least get the content pages ready for all of the front end stuff. For now it isn’t hard to just setup a randomizing JavaScript for the ideas and then build from there as time goes on. I hope to get some more templates up and running as well, I’m going to need to play around in Photoshop for a while anyway.

In any event, I’m going to get my butt in gear on finishing up the email. Maybe I’ll be able to get some more backgammon in while Sean is in the shower or something. At least it’ll keep me entertained – in peace and quite no less. I need to get my iPod back in here, I’m going nuts listening to all this crap going on around me!

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Cold Toes!

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

I rather like the feeling of being productive and while today was really no different than any other day, I accomplished more than I thought I would. I just spent the last few hours designing the templates for the administration panel on blog-ideas.net that Sean is going to code for me (functions wise). I didn’t realize how complex my ideas were but since everything is visually done for him, he basically just needs to fill in the blanks, that shouldn’t take too long for him to do at all. He’s planning on working in stages because he has another site he’s been working on for a while now, I think he’s close to completing it, if the guy he’s working for stops throwing out last minute idea’s of course.

I put up a new template on curvy-chick because the darker one that I’d put up the night before was really bothering me. I wanted something bright and simple and that’s exactly what this one is, white and blue with a hint of gray and nothing else. I also need to get my ass in gear with the templates for that site but I plan on cross-linking them to blog-ideas.net, I also intend to have AGn Designs work against that database as well. That’s another script that I may have to work on, it’s mainly more of a tracking-downloads thing though, this way I know which templates are going to be the ‘hot items’ I know for sure that the WordPress based templates will more than likely rank higher but I’m certain there are still people out there using B2, Movable Type and of course LiveJournal so naturally those should take off as well. Either way it’s just another group of things to add to the to-do list.

I woke up sweating my ass off this morning, Karen wound up turning off the A.C. before she went to work today and the room is such a heat box that it was close to impossible to get comfy. Sean said he’s just going to stay up until Karen leaves because it’s supposed to be worse today than it was yesterday. He’ll flick the switch from there, this way we’re at least comfortable. That’s about 2 1/2 hours away though, I know for sure that I won’t be able to stay up.

I’m just waiting on my toes to dry so that I can hop into bed. I only put on a base coat but then after getting involved in other things I forgot about what I started out to do. I figure it’ll be easier to just put the color on today. I’m more than likely going to be outside tanning anyway and I’m sure they’ll dry while I’m lounging, at least I’ll have good light to work off of. I just dread the humidity and that’s supposedly what we’re going to get today…oh joy!

I’ve heard that I confuse a few people when I say “today” or “tomorrow” in my posts. I stay up until about 7:30 in the morning. Right now it’s about 5:30 in the morning and I don’t feel it’s “tomorrow” until after I wake up, so while the rest of the world is working on Tuesday, I’m still convinced it’s Monday until I roll out of bed this afternoon.

Speaking of Tuesday’s, Reno 911 is out on DVD today. Sean needs to get his ass over to blockbuster to pick it up for me, MOVIE NIGHT! :w00t w00t:

In any event, the sun’s poking up so I’m going to have my last cig of the night and then get myself ready for bed. My toes are freezing but that’s because my desk is rather close to the air conditioning vent on the floor plus we also have the window one going as well. I wish I could put socks on! At least I know it’ll be warmer outside, that’s for sure.

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Slowly chugging along…

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

I’m currently running on about 2 hours of sleep. After we got back from dinner last night I wound up crashing until 3:30 this morning. It was only about 4 hours, then around noon I wound up falling asleep for another 2 hours but that didn’t help me much because my eyes are still bloodshot like holy hell. I’m planning on getting to sleep in the next hour or two, then I’ll be up around 6am and work a solid day. It’s kind of the schedule I like to be on at this point, honestly. I was too tired to go to the beach tonight, I really did want to see what the storms in the area are doing but I can’t keep my eyes open at this point, so there’s no real point in going.

I spent a lot of time keeping myself active today. I got a lot of work done and even managed to get some much-needed cleaning done around the house. The only thing left to tackle will be covered tomorrow. I’m going to wash the blankets in the living room because they reek of both smoke and dog. The toilet could use a good scrub and throwing some drain-o down in the tub and the sink wouldn’t hurt either. The water down here has turned my once very manageable hair, to straw. This straw is now falling out and having a cap on the drain wouldn’t help anything at this point. Baby’s hair is also falling out because of the water so naturally the drain is going to fill up quite a bit more than one would like. An hour-long soak should dissolve everything, I just love when things work ‘like new’ again.

I started throwing together another template for blog ideas. I’m now up to three, which is about 30% of where I wanted to be. I figure I’d start off with 10 high-quality templates and then go from there. I’d absolutely love to get my templates to the same high status of Beccary but I highly doubt that will ever happen. I’m only coding templates for WordPress at the moment but I’ll also have basic copies available for blogger.com, movable type and maybe even Live Journal depending on how far I want to take it. I also have some ideas for Greymatter, even though I absolutely HATE the program with a passion. It causes so many server fuck-ups it’s unreal, then I get shit from clients because the script is banned – boo hoo, go cry to your mother about it. I’m not putting clients at risk because you don’t know how to work with a secure blog program, for crying out loud! [/end rant]

In any event, I’m going to get back to work on the template. I’m working with some fairly interesting color schemes and I’m lucky that I have a few older ones sitting on my computer that could be coded up, most of them are based on PSD’s but that doesn’t matter too much. I include the Fonts and PSD’s with almost every template I create, I know quite a few people with Adobe so this shouldn’t be a big issue.s

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MmMm Coffee!

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

I just jolted myself up with a fresh brewed cup of coffee. I feel a little bit more awake now than I did a little while ago. I may still wind up just going to sleep for a few hours. While I do feel awake, my eyes are still randomly crossing while I’m coding things. I’ve gotten a few templates done for blog-ideas.net, they’re mainly basic templates I hope to get into more complex ones later on down the road. I figure I’ll see how the site actually does first and then I’ll put a lot more work into it. For now I’ll have the basic sections and then I’ll move on from there.

Bella is really matted down and won’t let me get near her with a scissor, sometime over the course of the next few weeks I’m going to have her shaved down but I need to get birthday gifts taken care of first. I set myself on a $300 limit but who knows what I’m going to find for my father. I’m getting him a new monitor, more than likely I’m getting it from Microcenter, but I was also considering getting him a new computer as well. I just don’t want to sit around and teach him how to use Vista, helping him figure out how to use a computer PERIOD was no easy task and I’m only going to be in New York for a couple of days. There’s also the factor that my sister doesn’t have a printer on her computer and people are finding it close to impossible to network Vista to XP, if you happen to have been able to figure it out, let Microsoft know that it wasn’t as easy as they claim.

Considering my father only really uses his computer to check email, I’m more than likely just going with a 15″ monitor. I was thinking something along the lines of this one because I have the 17″ model and I’ve seen the 15″ in the store and the picture quality is equally gorgeous. My sister has the same model in her room and it’s working out rather nicely for her. I was considering getting him the 17″ but it’s no longer available through Microcenter. I found it online but it’s about $40 more than I paid for mine and for the same price I can get the 19″ Widescreen from Microcenter. That would just confuse the hell out of him, too much desktop so little time…heh. So he should be fine with the 15″.

Baby is looking to get new monitors, his have been blacking out on him and he’s not overly sure if it’s the monitor themselves or if it’s the adapters for his dual DVI slots, either way he needs new ones because it’s close to impossible to read anything on those monitors, no wonder his eyes are getting pretty bad. He just got notification of a $200 credit card payment as his new “minimum balance” on the $2500 card. That’s going to fuck up his plans but I’m sure with a little work he’ll be able to handle it.

Bella finally decided to eat something, I managed to get her to eat a little bit of the meatloaf I put down, I had to put some cheese on it to even get her interested in it. This is probably the downside to animals living in an Italian household. She won’t touch anything unless it’s got some kind of marinara sauce and mozzarella cheese on it..heh.

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