“A Web Site Created by Babs” has always been my baby. When I ended up on LiveJournal, thanks to a Gundam Wing role playing game, I figured it would make a great way to keep the site’s “What’s News” page up to date. Then came the issues with Tripod and AWSCBB fell to the wayside in favor of LJ, IJ and Blogger. I didn’t mind too much. I had made a lot of friends at these journaling spots.

While working on “Maxwell Pink Tells Stories,” however, the itch to recreate the website started up and quickly intensified. Late last summer I decided to scratch it. I’ve made a few random posts, mostly due to DrakNet’s disabling the XML-RPC required to crosspost here via Semagic (for security reasons), but also because a lot of what I post is personal and it was just easier to put it in a f-locked post in the other journals. Today, however, I decided to make this my sole blog. It’s nothing personal, in fact I will continue to read my f-lists and participate in the communities I belong to. It’s just that, as I stated earlier, “A Web Site Created by Babs” is my baby, and it’s time I stopped being a neglectful parent.

Since I don’t have the “clearance” (aka upgraded accounts) on either IJ and LJ I can’t create a feed that those on my f-lists can friend and use to  easily keep up to date of my nonsense, so (at least for now) I will be manually feeding by posting links to my current posts. I would like to encourage everyone to subscribe to both my post and comment feeds (links to both can be found below), though, as well as registering. The latter allows you to post comments while providing the site some protection from spam.

Thanks for the good times! I truly hope everyone will continue to read me, here.

http://babspace.com/index.php/2009/01/03/home-sweet-home/

Hopefully I won’t piss off too many folks with this decision.

I am no longer the dreaded redhead. If the boys don’t Bogart the computer this week I’ll have pictures available.

After a week of staring at Max’s page status and not seeing any hits despite contray evidence elsewhere, I decided to investigate the forums for some answers. It took two days but I finally found the answer to my problem in a several month old thread. I was missing a tag in the footer! A tag that I had initially placed there for the “Share This” plugin because its installation required it to be there, but when I had issues with the plugin and chose not to reinstall it didn’t go back. The stats plugin info made no mention of this footer tag being required so I never thought to include it for that plugin. *rolls eyes* It’s working again. We’re even getting visits from visitors using relevent search terms. Yay! An older, but oddly compatible, version of “Share This” has since been installed. I figure with the server protecting caching plugin I also installed I might as well tempt fate. 🙂

I came across yet another “My child is an honor student at XYZ school” bumper sticker yesterday and thought I need one that reads “My child is a dumbass at XYZ school.” The Teen (AKA the aforementioned child) has offered to have his friends print some up at school, for him to sell. He figures he’ll make millions. 🙂

Amber is getting fat, and throwing her weight around.

Arlington’s Patriot’s Day parade sucked. Again.

Chowder (the series) is absolutely hilarious! As is Phineas and Ferb.

At the rate Netflix is going lately the 5% credit they are giving me for their screw up will probably disappear before my next billing. I received the wrong DVD. When I went to the site to let them know this, I discovered the disk that was supposed to be in my hands was still being listed on my queue as not being sent yet. I now have two copies of the correct disk, an additional movie listed in my currently out area of my queue, and neither of the movies that I returned several days ago have been removed from my queue. Oddly, the movie I initially received was at the bottom of my queue and disappeared from it when this whole mess started.

I am drunk and need more beer.

I had to re-install WordPress over the weekend after an attempt at fixing an issue with a Share This plugin went horribly wrong. *sheepish grin* Just prior to this attempt I had completely removed the widgets in the pathetically widgetized theme I was using, “hard coded” the sidebar, and finalized the tweaking of the colors and fonts. Naturally, after the reinstall I discovered the problem with the plug in had nothing to do with anything I did… it’s just not completely compatible with WP 2.5. *headdesk*

In the middle of all this I found another interesting theme, which prompts me to ask, “Who the hell are they designing these themes for?” Clearly not for anyone who actually reads them. I was taught that a row of text should be no wider than 60 characters/spaces, for ease in reading. Now I have gone as high as 65-70 without any speed reading accidents and I have read elsewhere that up to 80 characters is fine, but what I’ve been coming across lately significantly exceeds any of these rules. What’s worse is that in order to cram all this word-age into one line they have to make the font so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read it. Where the hell is the logic?

Of course the final straw is when the designers make more work for those of us who wish to make their sites easier to read. The original template I was using may have required me to do some work to make it as pretty as it was meant to be, but it was nothing compared to the aforementioned “interesting” one. In order to change the font size of the entries, which should of had its own class, I had to increase the size of the “body” font, then reduce everything else. After spending hours doing just that I added some widgets, only to find out that only three of the four were showing up. The dumbass designer did (or didn’t do) something to the theme that screws up the ability to have a RSS feed!

Needless to say I’m back with the original, widget-free, blog theme. If anyone wishes to take a look at it, it can be found at http://bishiharem.com

Aside from figuring out how to remove the date from the posts and changing the background color of the blog (which I think may be an image), Maxwell’s writing blog is up and running. Until I’m certain the other themes we’re looking at will work with the upgrade, we’re sticking with a slightly modified Kubrick layout. As a test I copied and pasted Chapter 1 of Links. I discovered that I can change privacy settings per post, and can even password protect them (this will be great for those original stories Max wishes to share just with friends). I’m not going to bother using WordPress’ import option as there are only a few things to move over currently. I also already know that I’m going to have to fight with changes to way the posts look anyway so, yeah.

In other news, TS2 University and Bon Voyage arrived yesterday. Note to self: to avoid drama from boys, get mail before they come home. I’ve never heard so much bitching and whining over Mom treating herself. University has been installed and one teen has already been shipped off. What happens if the parents don’t have any money? 🙁 I guess I’ll figure that out once I get around to playing Sims State. Tomorrow Bon Voyage will get installed. Dear Gods! How does one keep track and rotate through all the places?!