SPDN Updates Log

More Oopsies

2012-02-01T23:11:00.006-06:00

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.3.1-no-content.zip…

Download failed.: Failed writing body (45 != 1448)

This is why, if you ever use your own personal hosting account to store a bajeezus worth of huge Photoshop files for scholastic purposes (read: design homework), you should always DELETE them afterwards to avoid inadvertently going over your allotted server space.

I went to Wordpress and freaked out because I couldn't post, then deduced it was only from using my domain as a storage dump. Deleting my excess files solved the posting problem.

Yes. I oppose PIPA and SOPA.

2012-01-17T20:19:00.003-06:00

Please inform yourself and act accordingly.

http://sopastrike.com/

Sodapop.nu will be down on the 18th.

Post-Holiday Blues

2012-01-17T00:48:00.004-06:00

It was going great for a bit with art and photograph posts, now I've fallen behind a little bit - which I am blaming entirely on the holidays, of course.

Hopefully this little slump is something I can overcome soon, but not today, unfortunately.

The site's index page is now starting to be annoying to me, so I plan on changing that soon (as well as adding as some sort of indicator of where new posts are located, for visitor convenience).

SODAPOP.NU JOINS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

2011-12-11T21:19:00.003-06:00

After days of slaving away in my extra time, Sodapop.nu has now been converted to Wordpress!

This odyssey has included

developing my own Wordpress theme (no.. like.... REALLY developing the hell out of it)
using WAMP to test the theme..
posting my art now, WOOOO!!
posting some new photos and getting the ability to post older shit, WOOOO!!
killing the photoblog :( Aww, but it's been integrated fully, so it lives on!
making the ability to add comments to photos/art in a manner that doesn't piss me off or spam my inbox! (..knock on wood...)
making pretty Permalinks

.... and probably more, but I can't remember exactly as this has been a long process.

But, WOOOOO!! I think I can actually post now like a normal human!

Oopsies.

2011-11-26T18:46:00.004-06:00

If you've left a comment on the photoblog in the past few months and I didn't respond, these 3000+ snowballing comments from fake Canadian pharmacies that I just don't have the willpower to sift through could be why.

ell oh ell...

2011-11-08T11:15:00.001-06:00

Found this on accident earlier and it made me giggle.

Shhh.

I haven't read one of these in a long time.

It's really the little projects that I take for granted.

2011-10-28T01:07:00.002-05:00

Here's a REALLY little one. For now, anyway.

It's just a placeholder page until I get something up there. (Well, the somethings exist, they just aren't digitized. Or uploaded. Or with a decent framework so I won't abandon them after a month.) But just putting the placeholder was somewhat motivating.

More things to add somewhere: layouts (in an acceptable manner), avatars & signatures (these are especially awkward and I may have them GET THEIR OWN SITE OOOOOOOOHHH!!).

2011-10-26T20:13:00.002-05:00

...... REALLY? I managed to change a layout in LESS than a year! OH MY GOD, ALERT THE PRESS.

Hmm, anyway, who knows how long this one will stay up.

What I'd really like to do at this point is find a nice content management system suitable for art and images. You know, where each image could exist on its own, as a 'post', with 'tags', as well as in a gallery. I've tried to find something before, but obviously to no avail. Like pixelpost, but better. I'd really like to have an easy way to post things. You know, so maybe I would once in a while.

Eventually, what's going to happen is, if I can't find one I'm going to write my own.

But that could be possible in a precariously long amount of time. And I am IMPATIENT.

P.s. Why, Internet Explorer, will Blogger no longer WORK for you? The last few posts I've written, I've had to close out of IE and use Firefox to post. And generally, this makes me angry.

I'M IN LOVE

2011-10-20T21:11:00.002-05:00

I had my first experience with Adobe Illustrator this week.

It was love at first click. <3

In terms of relevancy, I'm done with the layout, so whenever I've stopped obsessing over it, I'll put it up.

I actually hate the word 'huzzah'

2011-10-19T01:41:00.001-05:00

I should be sleeping or doing economics homework but instead I'm up late working on a rehaul of my little web kingdom. HUZZAH!

Belle Monde

2010-11-27T20:30:00.002-06:00

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!

2010-10-28T16:35:00.004-05:00

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.

2010-10-27T18:00:00.022-05:00

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.

2010-10-27T04:12:00.005-05:00

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.

2010-10-23T21:18:00.002-05:00

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.

2010-10-11T21:56:00.004-05:00

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!

2010-05-30T01:36:00.004-05:00

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.

2010-05-25T23:19:00.003-05:00

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.

2010-05-21T00:05:00.004-05:00

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.

2010-05-20T15:15:00.006-05:00

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

ok, fine..

2009-04-16T22:42:00.004-05:00

It took me a bit longer than I wanted (SO BUSY) but yes, I finally got the new layout at Sodapop.nu up.

I want to do more than just swap layouts twice a year. I want to do more than just swap out layouts, period! :P But I still don't know just where I'm headed yet.

I AM A WEBSITE FIEND

2009-03-10T02:22:00.003-05:00

.. Ok, I'm sure some of you would beg to differ on that. But I'm happy because I bought a new computer and now have a new lease on my website-making life. For those of you who aren't aware (everyone, probably...?) I was using an old Toshiba laptop from 2006, which was pretty much a pile of shit when I got it and has degenerated even further over the past two and a half years. But nevermind that! That piece of shit has been banished to the pit of Acheron FOREVER and I am now reacquainted with THE GLORY OF A REAL MONITOR AND COLOR CONSISTENCY! I'm so excited!

Consequently (now for the relevant stuff :P), I've got a new layout for Sodapop.nu (and all I really have to do is rewrite a couple sections, and then I can put it up, so this shouldn't be an empty promise, although with me there's no telling :P but it is finished and coded and everything at this point) and a ton of plans and renewed enthusiasm for online projects.. Now if only I had the time.

I almost forgot..!

2008-09-16T05:17:00.002-05:00

I do actually want to start working on Redemption again, and that will probably be the first thing I do.

Anyway, now I'm done.

OH NO, LATE UPDATES WITHOUT UPDATES... something

2008-09-16T05:00:00.002-05:00

AHHHH! I had the clear intention of updating before now. Honestly. Seriously. But life sometimes gets in the way, you know?

Anyway, I just wanted to let you guys know that the declaration of my intent to return around here wasn't made in bad faith. I just haven't had a chance to do anything.

Well, I did make a layout for the Avril fansite I was wanting to do, and then decided that was a terrible idea, and that I didn't want to do it anymore.

..... But here's a list of things I WOULD like to do (and unfortunately that's the only "update" I can really offer right now.. ;_; ):
- Get my own layout up here. Ugh.
- Revamp Aftershock. I actually have a layout for it, but I need to figure out how to re-structure it.
~~- Dump Parallax in the trash where it belongs~~ Re-do or re-create or... something my photography site according to my current (better!!) standards, as Parallax as it is now makes me want to PUKE! I also really want a new name.
- I KNOW I SAID I WAS DONE WITH SHRINES, BUT I WANT TO EFFING MAKE A SHRINE FOR SOMEONE as soon as I can figure out who. :/ I have been through a plethora of ideas (Kid from Chrono Cross, Garnet from FFIX). They all suck.

This is getting negative, but wasn't supposed to be a negative post. :P

Anyway, I also need some form of personal blog I suppose, so I can type things like this and not feel bad about cluttering my updates page with it. But forgive me, I have to get this shit out somewhere. In the past week I have
... lived through a hurricane
... pierced my septum (.. not by myself though, not that cool)
... run into a pole with my car and snapped off my driver's side mirror
... learned the true generation gap between myself and my mother in that she was more pissed about the septum than she was about the car mirror (I mean really, what the hell?)
... bought Avril's new DVD and watched it TWICE
... decided to just freak out and let it go
I was just now thinking about all of that and thought it was crazy. I mean. One week.

... Maybe next time I'll have some real updates.

back online

2008-07-21T06:36:00.001-05:00

Hey there kids.. You've probably already noticed:

a) Sodapop.nu has a new layout;

b) Random changes to the main site (I killed off the 'joined' section, I made an 'about me' section *gasp*, everything has been rewritten, etc.)

c) As it says on the sites page, I lost the Fanlistings approval for "In the Shadows" so I killed it off.

d) And oh yes, after two years of the same nearly impossible to navigate layout and nearly constand neglect, I'm back. We'll see how this goes.