I’m really tired right now so I’ll try to make this coherent and brief. For a while now, I’ve been debating whether or not to display the desktop artwork I made when I was learning Bryce and Photoshop. I had a site, before this one that you’re currently visiting, to display my work and I seriously wanted to go into graphic designing for people. It was called Esoterik Graphics, hence the name of this site.

I’ve decided to re-display my work to the world, shabby as some of it is. I’m using the ZenPhoto web album for this; the same kind I’m using for the Photo Gallery. There’s only one image in there now, but I’ll have more up tomorrow. I’ll also have notes on each image. The UI doesn’t look consistent with the rest of the site, but I’ll be working on at least the color scheme very soon after this week (hopefully!).

Click on the “Art and Stuff” tab in the menu bar above, and enjoy!

Update: I now have several desktops and one recent project up for viewing. Will add more as time goes on. As always, thanks for visiting!

Things are going very smoothly now since working with PowWeb on the PHP issues. Yesterday, the photo gallery was working very well and the blog had most, if not all, of the random pictures loading correctly in the sidebar. Aside from me almost screwing up the config file again, and then finding my problem and fixing it again (not knowing what the heck I had just done!), I was able to fix the links for every page to be tied together. Navigation is much less complex now.

As stated previously in my last entry, the accidental zapping of the blog’s main database and subsequent backup re-install affected 2 recent entries. One entry was sent back into draft status, with a few more lines to write, and the other entry was banished to cyber-oblivion with no hope for recovery. That’s such a pity… that entry detailed the recent changes I had made to the look and functionality of the blog itself. It also detailed my inspiration for the changes and what I had done to accomplish them. I cited a fellow blogger, with her blog being the source of said inspiration, and she gave a very nice comment. I feel bad about that because this is the second time a goof-up on my part nixed one of her comments; the first was on my guestbook. Britgirl, if you’re reading this, my heartfelt apologies to you.

Speaking of the guestbook, I finally got around to fixing and implementing the newer security features on it. Today was the first day that I haven’t had to clear any spam comments out of it! Sometime later, I want to monkey around with the CSS on it to see if I can make it look more like the blog itself. Hopefully then I can do the same with the homepage. I like the green on black motif of the blog, rather than the neon blue on black of the homepage.

Next to-do: Update the links in the sidebar. The SuperSociety link will be the first one jettisoned!

Cheers!

(Taken from my MySpace blog)

Completely accidental!! That’ll teach me to mess around with MySQL and delete the WRONG database. Luckily, PowWeb (the serving company I go through) keeps three days of backups on their systems. The support I talked to said their techs can re-install the database. Hopefully everything can be restored like it was!

Funny thing about this is, I thought I had all the bases covered. I thought for sure that I had backed up all of the database. Unfortunately, I had only backed up my photo gallery database, not the one for WordPress. Thus, when I tried to delete the photo galley info to reinstall, I had the database for WordPress selected. Poof! My blog reloaded with the words “It doesn’t look like you’ve installed WP yet. Try running install.php.” AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Thank God my wife stopped me from 1) hyperventilating, 2) swearing in thirty languages and 3) swinging the battleaxe at the computer. The mere thought of losing nearly two years of heartfelt blog entries made me go crosseyed with despair and anger.

Well, here’s hoping for the peeps in tech-support!

Update: The blog is back up. Unfortunately, it’s missing my last two entries. Oh, well… better missing very little than being S.O.L.! Actually, one of them is in draft mode, so that’s ok. I can always re-create the last one, except for the cool comment that was left by a friend!

Technorati Tags: Esoterik, Blogging, MySQL Problems

Well, now things are looking good! The Esoterik site is good to go. Like I said in the last post, just click the link at the top of the sidebar, “Back to Main Site”, to go to the main page. This will be our personal “family” site. I have a page up for me, a page for Christine, and links to this blog and the Photo Gallery. Soon, I hope to have a page for the birds, and email (form mailer) page and a guestbook page. Coolness!!

Cheers!

Update: There is now a guestbook, and it is christened! –C.L.W.

Hello again! As you all can see, I took down the ImOnline plugin. It was nifty at the time, but I really don’t need it. Besides, after talking with the developer and futzing around with it, I still couldn’t get it to notice me on Skype. All it recognized was AIM.

Anyways, I have a replacement for that sidebar plugin. It works with my new photo gallery and is even linked to it! As you again can see, it randomly spits out a picture from the gallery. You can click on the little picture to see it in the gallery directly, or you can click the link I put up to see the gallery’s front page. I also thought it’d be a good way to introduce the new gallery to all my family and friends! Oh, and I also made the “About the Author” page (finally!) to give people some insight into who wrote this stuff that they’re reading!

The ASCS site redesign is coming along good. Actually it’s not so much a redesign as it is a re-coding. I’m not changing the layout; it’s great the way it is. All I’m changing is the way it’s presented in the browser. It’s a challenge, considering how different IE renders pages compared to all the other, more web standards-compliant  browsers. People, I respect Microsoft, but the Explorer browser sucks! I heartily recommend Firefox to anyone over the other browsers. Please do yourselves a favor and check it out!

Work was great this week, but the next two weeks are going to be hell. I didn’t have much of a choice in the way I scheduled things, but the least I could do was to give us an easy week this last one. I just hope I make it through this month intact, because the next two months are going to be much bumpier!

That’s all from me. Cheers!