Belle Monde

Oh, dear God. Finally, Sodapop.nu has a new layout.

It validates and everything.

And, umm, it's cute?

Sorry, maybe there was some other milestone involved in this, but I can't remember it. I was a lot more excited about this layout.. Hmm.. Before it took forever to code. I'm glad it's done.

I still feel as if I'm forgetting to mention something? Oh well.

Wordpress wins!

Ta-daaaaa! Finished!

... Bands steal all the good names
Amelia's tentatively named photoblog

Once I found a theme that did what I wanted it to do, Wordpress won out as my photoblog system of choice. I tried Pixelpost, but all of the themes were one-photo-per-post kind of deals, which wasn't what I wanted. I also tried Gallery, but was too stupid to know how to fix the way it handled image resizing and compression, and the default settings were quite meh.

I'm really happy the way it turned out. I was afraid no templates would work and I would either have to wait an eternity until I learned how to make one myself, or use something that pissed me off. Fortunately, I found the perfect one. Someday, I'll make my own. But until then, this works great!

I probably haven't been this excited about a website since I opened Valkyrie. And that was 10 years ago. So this is a good day.

P.S. I did choose Wordpress. We'll see how it goes.

I've figured out the great mystery of why I have despised blogs for years and years.

Far too often a blog is presented as a website. Whether this is because somebody (myself included, honestly) wants a CMS but doesn't know it exists (or is in this mess far, FAR over her head...), because Google is a tool of doom with an algorithm prone to linking to dumbass things, or what, I don't know. But if I were those W3C people (did you guys die? I'm reading a book written in 2005 about HTML and you did some big stuff in years gone by about web standards I'm told... dunno about since then?) I'd be tackling this new problem that is slowly creeping in and making common sense web searching a huge headache.

Here's a great analogy. Imagine a website as a scientist's final, finished publication. And a blog as his notes in his journal. If I want to read about his discoveries, I want to read the final, tweaked, polished, well-explained, well worked out product - his final publication. Or in the real case, I want to visit his website. I don't want to read his notes and see him pissed off and read the 20 things he did in his experiment wrong before he got it to work. I'm in a hurry. I'm not in academia, I just want to know what he found out, I don't give a crap about the process. I don't want to see his blog.

In a more pressing example, if I want to look up information about, say, Toodles, the main character in WHEN SQUIDS ATTACK!, if I'm going for super bare bones in all honesty I might use Wikipedia. But if I want some real pseudo-academic writing about Toodles, an analysis of his thoughts and dreams, I might visit a website about him. But if I go to Google and type in Toodles and see some blog posts on the first page that go something like LIKE OMG TOODLESSS IS SO FIININIENNE!!!1!!! it makes me pissed. Because obviously, this is not what I'm looking for. This is a waste of my time. I want a structured, somewhat finalized approach to a discussion of Toodles. I also feel a similar sense of irritation if the first few links are to massive websites full of advertising and only five sentences about Toodles that are subpar to what I could have found on Wikipedia. Again, this is a waste of my time.

I realize this is an example based solely on the premise of a person searching for information on a video game/comic book/anime character and shouldn't apply to everything. But it's just like if someone wanted to read about a definition of weblogs, they wouldn't want to read this shit, am I right? This is my personal commentary on something. I don't want to pretend to present it as anything else, or have some company try to sell me something (whether the sale is based on money or just based on me using their idea for what I 'should' be doing with what I write) that presents it as anything else.

And I seriously practice what I preach; bots are off limits in here to prevent some dumb thing I ramble about from turning into an unintended keyword in a search that is actually unrelated to anything anyone would really want to search for in here.
... Well, at least I think bots are off limits here. They're off limits in my super personal whiney space, anyway, so they should be here too.

I'm also intentionally creating a photoblog until I take enough pictures that I like enough and deem good enough to make a more finalized showcase of my work (or, a website). I will not use this photoblog as my portfolio. Because it isn't. Responsible web-use, people.

There needs to be a change. And it either needs to come from the people who are generating content (choose a system more appropriate for what you want to do, please. Thank you.) or it needs to come from the people who are managing the way others search for previously existing content. I don't like search engines, but.. what else is there? Herein lie the problems. And I'm going to keep whining until something better happens.

Blogs, I forgive you. You're great. You can't help it that the people who use you are braindead.

But, what do I know. I make websites; of course I'll champion them, campaign for them, and try to prevent their demise in an information universe of ineffective search engines, blogs, social networking tools and irrespnsible advertisers. Big, motherfucking period.

Impending blogdom.

I'm trying to make an acceptable photoblog, but my only available options at this point are either:

- a PHP-heavy monster I can't understand and therefore can't modify in any acceptable manner

- a gallery for the dumbest of the dumb that's easy to use but looks tacky... REAL tacky.

I'm too braindead from sleep deprivation to make a decision, but in any case, this is what I'm working on.

A lesson.

If you're trying to make up names for your website/domain/design company/pet goldfish, always check it on Google first before making it permanent. Or buying a domain name, in the case of everything except the goldfish.

Otherwise the joke's on you and you could might end up with a name that's Samoan for penis sheath, or something.

This probably happens a lot more often than one thinks.

Fortunately, I checked Google.

Okay, universe. You got me.

What. The. Fuck?

I just googled 'Ninamori Eri' and under the image search, instead of seeing.. like.. images from my Ninamori shrine, I find the Marie Antoinette heading for Sodapop.nu.

I just don't even understand how the Google page rank (image rank?) could be more impossibly misguided.

..... Wait just a sec, is something missing from this post? Oh, right. Tangible updates.

So I'm taking some time to learn things about HTML I should've learned about ten years ago. I plan on making some massive rehauls of older sites just to practice and get ready for other upcoming projects.

And I suppose I'm not getting rid of this domain quite yet. That's always nice, right?

THE PLOT THICKENS!

When I first uploaded my pretty Rococo layout for Sodapop.nu with Filezilla, I made a note here about how it exploded into a fit of Chinese characters. Re-uploading everything with the control panel File Manager seemed to fix the problem, but I wasn't exactly sure why. And went on with life.

Cut to about a week ago, and I discovered that my pretty Rococo layout was looking pretty lame in Firefox. The style sheet wasn't working/loading. I finally tried to fix this ominous problem today, and found out: a) Firefox wants everything to be encoded the same way, style sheet or html (and gets pissed and won't display the style sheet if the encoding doesn't match); b) Filezilla works only with ASCII or UTF-8; c) if you try to upload something encoded in Unicode with Filezilla, it turns into a fit of Chinese characters (what happened to the Rococo layout the first time I tried uploading it); d) re-saving all of my files (css included!) for this layout in UTF-8 and re-uploading them with Filezilla seemed to fix everything. I think. Sometimes my style sheets still weren't showing up in Firefox, but it worked once so I think it might be a cache problem?

I hate webdesigners. And Firefox. All of this mess just because I wanted cute little hearts and saved my text files in Unicode to keep them. :/

SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY.

My bad.

I just realized that none of the links on the 'sites' page of the new layout actually went anywhere. Oops. :P

While I like the impression this gives regarding my state of affection for my uploaded* creations right now, I've fixed it.

Also, Nandaba.net is now dead, so Elsewhere is temporarily(?) gone, which you may have noticed if you scrupulously memorized my sites list probably didn't notice. But, since I have all of the files for episodes 1 & 2, I was thinking that if I'm feeling particularly bored and/or ambitious someday I might end up uploading them anyway, just for the sake of FLCL. But this really shouldn't be high on my priority list.

* A distinction that I would like to make clear, as I have a ton of not-yet-finished or uploaded things that I tend to like. Very much.

I changed the "layout" for this.

And by that I mean, I changed the template and the fonts and the colors, because I'm retarded and can't figure out how to do much else. But it looks infinitely better.

I'm not sure what a picture of myself with my doppelganger has to do with anything, but... it's creepy! No longer boring! And better than the other picture I wanted to use of my cat in my refrigerator (this sounds less sick if I tell you that she happened to jump in there when I was pouring milk for my cereal, and I was quick enough to get a picture), or something completely off the wall like Samejima Mamimi.

Finally, a layout with adequate text space.

You can thank Marie Antoinette for saving Sodapop.nu. No jokes. I've been striving to come up with a new name for months, and while I was putting up this layout I decided that the name Sodapop.nu wasn't the problem.

Also, apparently text files saved in Unicode are too much for Filezilla to handle, because when I first uploaded the layout it exploded into a fit of Chinese characters. Oddly enough though my little hearts still showed up, the whole reason behind saving the file in Unicode? Whatever. I re-uploaded everything with the control panel FTP client and it seemed to work fine. :P