Meta entries
There’s new writing on the way; I’ve been held up by an injured hand. Also the fact that after weeks of having nothing important to say (and feeling lame about it, too, such that I wrote a bunch of inane fluff about my dog just to be writing something), I suddenly have too much to say. I’m having trouble sorting it out into anything coherent.
While I wrestle with this, I have finally started something I’ve intended to do since I started this ‘new’ blog several months ago: retrieve the best of my older journal entries, and make them available again.
I’m reposting them without edits, except for reducing most of the names to initials. I’m also adding them under the date that they originally appeared, so you won’t see them show up as new entries here. (Not sure about the RSS feed.) You can find them by the nine lives tag, though, and there’s a permanent link on the ‘Past’ page as well.
They’re coming in non-chronological order; I’m choosing things that I think are important for some reason. In some cases — but not all — this means they’re backstory for something yet to come.
What was I thinking, going from zero blogs directly to two? I never seem to have the time to do more than one significant entry per day, and even that much is not indefinitely sustainable. I am a perfectionist who edits iteratively as I write; this is not conducive to speed. If I can get a single sentence down in fewer than four rephrasings, I’m doing well.
Anyway, if I’m not here for a little while it’s probably because I’m posting over there. If I’m not here or there, I’m probably up to my eyebrows in worldbuilding research. You can still talk to me though; I’ll talk back …
Okay, I’ve got two new comment plugins working now, one that puts recent comments in the sidebar and one that allows comment notifications by email. I did some hacking of the php script on the latter (to improve layout, however slightly) and haven’t fully tested the whole subscribe/unsubscribe procedure, so please let me know if there are glitches.
Also: behind the scenes, I added the Widget Context plugin. It is a thing of much usefulness and beauty.
WordPress sidebar widgets, while neat and easy, lock you into an everywhere-or-nowhere choice. Widget Context lets you specify locations on a per-widget basis, on the fly. All I’ve done with it thus far is to remove the ‘Recent Entries’ widget from the front page, where it’s redundant, but the capabilities go much farther. All WP bloggers should have this!
I underestimated the power of my perfectionist streak. Should know myself better than that …
I genuinely had every intention of using a premade WordPress theme and just tweaking it slightly. I even had a decent one picked out. But naturally this turned out to be an exercise in a hundred tiny annoyances and dissatisfactions, so after about an hour I tossed it and started rolling my own code and design. From scratch.
Took me two long days of doing not much else to get to this point (which made for a very mopey Jak, as I’ve been unavailable for working on our novel). It’s bare-bones at the moment, so I’ll be adding features as I go, and I’m sure I’ve missed some style combinations that will crop up as it gets further use.
But I am happy with it, which is saying a lot, because these days I am crotchety and very hard to please.
Caveat: If you’re using IE 7 you’re probably seeing some mess, because this is my party and I refuse to spend hours attempting to cater to a crappy browser. IE 8, Firefox, and Safari all work properly.
More details on the site page.
Here we are with yet another (I’ve lost count!) incarnation of Karawynn essay-journal-blog-thing. For now I’m calling it ‘musings’, which is painfully unoriginal, I know, but I wasn’t going to postpone the project until I could think of something more clever. The title isn’t really important, for this, and using the home directory of karawynn.net means I can change it anytime.
Because I’m me, I can’t just implement even a good design created by someone else, no … I have to get in there and fiddle with it. So until I get things arranged to my satisfaction, there will be intermittent breakage. Shouldn’t be too long, a day or two perhaps; once I get a burr under my saddle (to lapse into the vernacular of my childhood) I move quickly.
In the meantime, I’m just that girl behind the curtain. Nothing to see here. Yet.
