I decided to revamp the look of my website this weekend, since I’d resolved to finally move to a new webhost as my hosting fee was coming due. I’ve recently become kind of obsessed with owls (random) so I decided to go with a fall-like owl theme. I couldn’t find any pre-made wordpress themes that fit the bill, so I found a theme and modified the heck out of it with the help of firebug and istockphoto. I’m pretty pleased with the results. I know that probably zero people will ever see it, but since I do this site for no one but myself, that’s A-OK with me. 
As it often happens when I revamp my site, I started to get all reminiscent about the beginnings of my blog. I visited the Internet Wayback Machine at archive.org and typed in aliwolly.com. The earliest iteration that popped up was from December 2004 – my pink landing page, which linked out to my photo albums (the older ones were self-hosted) and my blogger blog. So that was fun to poke around in, but then I thought, “Huh. 2004? That’s the earliest?” Then I remembered that my original website was hosted on my PC and used dyndns.com to point a url to my PC’s IP. Yep, turns out I’ve been a geek for a long time. So I threw aliwolly.homeip.net into the wayback machine and found a version of my blog from 2002: pre-blogger. I probably originally built the site in Sept 2001 on tripod.com before I moved it to my PC. It’s completely intriguing that there’s this internet archive project out there and that something as insignificant as my website is archived in it. I guess, so far as websites go, mine could be considered pretty old – “online since 2001!” – but I can’t imagine that it’s interesting to anyone but me.
My old posts are endlessly fascinating to me. I decided to look back at October 2002 – I was pretty verbose that month with 42 posts! – and laughed my ass off reading my posts from 10/13/02. The first one relates a story about a Pizzaria Uno’s dining experience and me pulling a typical Ali move and speaking without thinking. Telling your waiter that your leftover pizza would “smell like ass” is apparently a good way to get it taken off the bill (and embarrass everyone you’re dining with). The second post is about the time that I learned the expression, “Soup to Nuts” in one of my grad school classes – but thought the prof said, “Soupy Nuts” and suppressed giggles ensued. Actually, the whole month of October that year has some pretty good posts – I wish I could get back to writing like that again. Lately work is just all-encompassing and I am so tired by the time I shake work out of my head that I just go to bed. Sigh. Speaking of… Goodnight!
Popularity: 28% [?]
Filed under meta | Comments (2)Because apparently it never occurs to me to finish my chores when I get bored. D’oh.
I put a new design on my site today. Decided to take a simple DIY Wordpress Theme (created by the girl who did the bluebird blog template I was using before) and customize it a bit. The Firebug Firefox add-on made playing around with the basic edits I did really simple, but I still ended up killing a few hours going back and forth on a few different designs. I love the colors and the header image and the overall simplicity of the look. I also love that it sort of reminds me of Christmas (the orbs in the header sort of look like ornaments to me) but then it also reminds me of nesting and spring, so this design might stick around for a while. Weeee…
Alex thinks I’m crazy for spending hours doing crap like that. I guess it looks like work to him. Doesn’t feel like it to me. It’s oddly fun.
Oh, and while I’m talking about fun little projects, I just have to share the Photoshop job I did for the “overview webinar” at work that incorporates our new logo:
I found a stock image of a magnifying glass and cut out the glass part of it into a new image. I took our logo and spherized it and inserted it as a layer into the original magnifying glass. Then, I brought back in the glass of the magnifying glass as a new layer that I made less opaque. I think it looks awesome for a 10 minute Photoshop (much better than most of the graphics on our site 
). Well, actually, I wish that I’d spherized the logo more. Ah well. I wish I could find more excuses to do fun little projects like that at work instead of stupid boring managerial stuff.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Filed under Geek | Comment (0)So I finally switched off of BlogSpot to a WordPress blog hosted on my little rented server space that I’ve had since 2004 (when I first thought of doing this…). My Blog is six years old this month, and in honor of that anniversary, I figured it was time for a change. I’m still working things out – I may not stick with this theme, though I really like it right now and I’m playing around with the widgets (yep, having a calendar of posts and a drop down of archives is a little redundant, but… Whatever! Whatever! I do what I want!). I did my little “About” page last night and have started to go through past posts tonight to categorize and tag them (so the tag cloud and category numbers are not exactly reflective of the final counts yet…). Anyway, I’m having some good geeky fun – and it keeps me from obsessing about work at night. (Although, it doesn’t actually get me to bed any earlier than the nights where I stay up working forever… But at least it keeps me from becoming too terribly one dimensional – though it doesn’t help me out any in the social department…) Well, I’m rambling and it’s late so I guess I should make myself go to bed…
Popularity: 20% [?]
Filed under meta | Comments (2)Just a crappy short little video that I shot to test how easy it would be to record and post in case the family was interested in doing that on Their Blog when they move to Dubai…
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Filed under meta | Comment (0)For the blog. Not us – for a change. I decided to switch over to have blogger host my blog instead of ftp-ing to my server. I did this because the new version of blogger has some nifty features that I wasn’t able to take advantage of before, like the ability to use layouts to modify the look of your blog (although, sillily enough, I made the layout look exactly like I had it before) and the ability to include the tag list – I mean, why bother tagging my posts if I can’t display a nifty list of the tags to choose from? I’ve been toying around with the idea of upgrading my blog to a different Content Management System, but I’d need to change my hosting to a differnt type of server and it seemed like so much work so I figured I’d stick with what’s free and easy for now. I’ve still got some tweaking to do, but in the meantime, enjoy – and don’t forget to update your bookmarks/favorites!
Popularity: unranked [?]
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