Tweeting Pug
I Figured it Out!
Published January 21, 2012 | 
I can post to my hosted WordPress blog, and then by using a special bookmarklet (Press This), can add THAT post to THIS blog! And the pics stayed hosted over @ WordPress.com
Howcoolizat!?
Gotta figure out how to adjust the pic size, though.
Screw it.
Published August 4, 2011 | 
Latest version of Safari does not show my galleries. I don’t care if the code Imagekind generates is invalid. I’m restoring my galleries. The hell with validating this site. I give up. You nerds go fix it, I’m through.
More Fun with Unicornify!
Published August 2, 2011 | 
It’s not just for avatars…
Enter your name, or a word, your birthday, your address, a mathematical anything! You will get a unicorn personalized just for that bit of information! How awesome is that?
Getting Rid of my Gravatar and Using Unicornify, My Identicon of Choice
Published August 2, 2011 | 
The other day I was installing the latest version of WordPress and twiddling around, seeing if there was another option to the various Identicons that are offered. There is the original Identicon (which looks like quilt squares), Wavatar (goofy geometric faces), Monster ID (which I was using for this blog, various silly monsters with arms and legs) and now in the recent version of WP, Retro, which look like old 80s video game icons.
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Gloating
Published July 29, 2011 | I am gloating!
After a few fixes, I was able to validate the new version of my jewelry site. It’s not hard to do as Artisteer creates valid markup, but what gets dicey is when you add various elements like sidebar widgets.
So I checked this blog over at the Validator, and I got about 87 errors. Every single error came from a sidebar widget. I had to recall the Recall Walker Countdown Widget…it gave too many errors that I couldn’t figure out how to fix. But I did figure out how to fix the Imagekind Art Galleries which were giving the majority of the problems, and now? CLEAN CODE that validates!
Yippee!!!
I love it when I can fix nerd stuff that nerds should’ve fixed in the first place.
WordPress Emoticons
Published July 22, 2011 | You may find these useful.
Remember, Do NOT use spaces when typing emoticons!
| icon | text | text | full text | icon | full text |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
: ) | : – ) | : smile : |  |
: lol : |
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: D | : – D | : grin : |  |
: oops : |
 |
: ( | : – ( | : sad : |  |
: cry : |
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: o | : – o | : eek : |  |
: evil : |
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8 O | 8 – O | : shock : |  |
: twisted : |
 |
: ? | : – ? | : ??? : |  |
: roll : |
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8 ) | 8 – ) | : cool : |  |
: ! : |
 |
: x | : – x | : mad : |  |
: ? : |
 |
: P | : – P | : razz : |  |
: idea : |
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: | | : – | | : neutral : |  |
: arrow : |
 |
; ) | ; – ) | : wink : |  |
: mrgreen : |
I’ve Taken it Upon Myself…
Published July 21, 2011 | 
…to upload our post icons from the MadMen avatar generator thingy. So far I have a couple for Stan, but need to add some more he did of himself last night. We totally wigged out on it, generating pictures of ourselves and even our friend Bill (don’t tell him, I have no idea what he would think) who turned out looking like Buddy Holly’s twin because you can’t do long hair on men as I’m sure you’ve all found out. Continue reading
Mid-Century Modern Graphic Enhancements
Published July 20, 2011 | 
Stan and I are probably the only cable-subscribers on earth who do not watch MadMen. But I found this amazing avatar generator online based on that show. If you like mid-century modern illustration and iconography, you will LOVE it. Below are two versions of myself I did. The one w/sunglasses reminds me of pics of my mom from that era. Be warned, it’s REALLY hard to find clothes and hairstyles that are similar to the styles you normally wear. No long hair and jeans for you. Continue reading
Another Graphic Enhancement
Published July 20, 2011 | I added a new widget which allows me to select from a set of pictures to add to posts. I’m going to be using the icon I created of myself yesterday (still haven’t decided what to do about my gravatar comment icons). I split it up into 9 sections, so each post will show one of those parts of me.
Obviously if you guys want to use icons for yourselves, you’re welcome to let me know what you want and I’ll be happy to make them for you, but if you use mine it’ll look like I’m posting, so…um, not a good idea.
Fun with Themes!
Published April 27, 2011 | Since I got the latest Artisteer 3.0 I’ve been looking at all the new features and decided to redo this design.
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Artisteer 3.0
Published April 25, 2011 | Artisteer 3.0 just came out the other day. This version allows for fluid width, and editability so you can create actual web pages directly in the program, instead of saving out a template and editing in BBEdit or another text editing program.
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4 Gilded Creatures
Published February 17, 2011 | I created a new look for the blog. I wanted to have a more updated picture of Jasper without bendy ears. One of the really old themes even had a picture of Plato, so I wanted to update to the current lineup of animals. Also, the ones created last July were sort of created hastily anyway, so I wanted to have something else. This is the first time I’ve had some time to work on it. This design fits better with my Eyebalm Fine Art site too. It’s sort of a pain playing around with widgets (the sections in the sidebars in WordPress for the uninitiated). Each time I install a new theme, my widgets disappear. I don’t know why this happens. I would like to have more of a variety of art styles of the pet pictures in the future. This is the Gilded Pets…I could do a pop art version, or some other genres too. I’ll play around some more. The theme switcher ability will return at some point.
I Nearly Had a Coronary! (well, figuratively speaking)
Published August 2, 2010 | I hate technology so much sometimes!
Morning started out well, a bit muggy and mosquitoey, but that’s to be expected. I was playing with Jasper and then decided to check my email and websites. I have my wordpress dashboards come up in tabs in the window with a bunch of other bookmarked “morning sites.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. My dashboards were royally efdup. Click the thumbnails below to see what I mean. I’m glad I took a picture of them to prove I wasn’t imagining things.
I knew what had happened. I had been hacked.
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- The Dingbatcave Wordpress Dashboard
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- Ann-S-Thesia
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- This Site
So I immediately contacted my hosting company…er…let me rephrase that. After I got a sudden wave of hotness all over my body as it went into panic mode, after my stomach unravelled some butterflies, after I put the puppy in his crate and paced around wondering what on earth to do, after I felt like vomiting, I contacted my hosting company.
I looked into it some more and some of my sites had also been effected. Main headers, mostly. And although my wordpress dashboards said I had a zero count for posts and pages, they were all still there.
I also did a search for wordpress hacked, and came to a wordpress.org page. And you know what? It looked like someone had hacked that page too!
OK, wait a minute, I thought…how can this be happening? How can both my sites AND WordPress itself be hacked? So I thought I better get a 2nd opinion, meaning my other laptop. So I went upstairs and checked it out. And everything looked normal. So I contacted my hosting company again, feeling a little embarrassed having jumped the gun (but what would you do, right?) and told them it might be my computer.
In fact, I don’t even know if it was my computer. I checked it on Firefox (Safari is my default) and everything looked normal. I had to restart Safari by force quitting, and once I restarted, everything looked normal.
I’m pretty stumped. A real “what was that that just happened?!?” moment.
There’s too many questions I can’t even begin to ask.
Phew, that was close.
Published July 30, 2010 | That was a close one. I saw the update for WordPress 3.01 staring me in the face. I decided to update this blog first using the automatic updater…and it failed. Something about unable to find the public_html folder or something. So I did a search and found out one had to delete the “upgrade” folder, create a new one, and chmod it to 777. OK, did that. Then tried the update again and it failed even worse. couldn’t copy some file wp-admin/css/theme-editor.dev.css. It even put an ugly maintenance page on my site as well.
I hate it when technology screws around with me…sets my body into panic mode.
So I then frantically searched for information on what to do. I figured out I should probably attempt a manual update. So I did that, followed the instructions, and fortunately it worked, thank goodness.
You wouldn’t be reading this if it didn’t.
When it comes to my WP installs, this site as well as Ann-S-Thesia, have problems with automatic updates and installations. Have to do a lot of manual installs. Dingbatcave doesn’t have problems like that. BTW, Dingbatcave and Ann-S-Thesia aren’t live yet with the revised part of the sites. I’m still working on that, and probably won’t have it done any time soon since August will not exactly be productive as far as web sites go.