New personal page, last one this year. hey, at least there’s an update in less than a year.

After more than a year, I posted a new personal page. No big difference from before, indicating that either a) my life hasn’t changed from a year ago or b) my life is so boring that it doesn’t change.

At long last, August’s personal page is posted.

I did this 100 things page. Probably years too late, cos that seems out of fashion now, but it was kinda interesting to do.

April's personal page, the one I deliberately delayed until April, is posted.

I added a link to the site stats under the tmi section. Links to the left hand nav bar are includes, so it was just a matter of adding the link to sidebarmain.inc.

Ever since I started subtly including the link to quiet thoughts as my sig in some forums (nanowrimo, pens etc), I've had a few visitors that way. Don't think many, but at least one person has mentioned it to me on one of those forums. Now I look at stats pretty much everyday, whereas before I might look once a week or fortnight.

I have 2 stats available: /stats and /stats/awstats. awstats look prettier so I tend to look at that, but I think it's understated, plus it only gives me current month. stats give monthly summaries that I can click to drill down.

awstats say I've had a total bandwidth usage of 865MB up to today, and stats say 1.05GB. Control panel agrees with stats. So now this month's the first time I've gone over 1GB. Luckily I have 4GB left.

As for visitors, I passed 200 on 15 Jan. Not sure what I did on that day, but there was a lot of traffic. Most common hits are the CA gifs on pens and the rotating image on each page. Basically, it's an illusion, the so-called visitors are pages calling the images and not really actualy human eyes.

Almost all hosts are me anyway, I recognise 199.201.45.129 which is the IP address of my work machine. The others are netvigator IP addresses generated everytime I logon. So again, it's just me.

Whatever.

Added a new object to the gallery of whimsy. Was writing this short story that had a pair of hand painted stained glass cufflinks and a reader commented about it. Which got me thinking about the cufflinks I have, so that's another entry. Anyway the picture of the cufflinks, just to show how geeky I am:

Created a static page in hidden doors where pdf versions of completed fics can be downloaded. Just copied the hidden doors main index, stripped out MT related code and wrote the rest in a text editor.

It's a static page, not controlled by MT, so I need to update whenever I finish a story and want to make it available.

Will probably do the same for innermost room, except most of the stuff there aren't even on Word.

I was going to put up a new page in December but then I've had 6 new pages in 2004, which seems a good number so I left it till now.

So, January 2005 personal page is posted.

I converted part of what used to be Delicacies & frivolities (the "stuff" section) to MT. This section used to have:

• habitat - floorplans and places I've lived in
• recipes - duh, recipes
• musicallity - iPod playlists
• drive - basically a page of the red golf
• evidence - strange gallery and packing list

Habitat, drive and evidence now constitutes the new d&f. Musicality too, but that'll be a harder job cos a) I re-did all my playlists so they'll have to be listed again and b) I don't want to have frames or tables.

Recipes and food related, I'm going to open a brand new section just to deal with food.

What I regret losing is the 3x3 grid display format on the main page.

Remember this? Specifically Q8?

I finally got round to making the top logo image clickable that links back to the main page of each section. In MT pages, there are too many templates so it's a simple include, so I only need to change the image or link or whatnot once.

almost forgot. The newest personal page is up.

I actually completed a story on hidden doors. Completed. Com-pleted. Yay. I had so many in progress stories, plus some that aren't even written down.

It's only a short story, around 2,300 words. But for someone who doesn't normally finish stories it's a sort of achievement.

New personal page is added, something new, something old, something different.

I have my first member! I created pizzaorme, using Movable Type. Now I'm 2 authors and 3 "proper" weblogs, which I think is already over the allowance in the free version of MT3. Luckily I haven't upgraded, under 2.661 I can have as many as I like.

The pizza section looks like the rest of the site, we'll have to work a bit harder to customize it, too many links are to my stuff, like I think we need to come up with a different faq and picture.

I read that under their definition a "weblog" is one that's regularly updated (a 90-day frequency has been mentioned). I think they mean that the static pages like pictures, writings don't really count as a weblog. Definitely in my mind they're not, I just use the MT technology to build these pages.

Anyhow, I'm not upgrading to MT3 till I get the whole site done so there's a little while to go yet.

The gallery, or properly known as stained glass window, is converted to MT. I debated on whether to use other methods, amongst others photostack, gallery, coppermine.

But I'm sticking with MT for the time being, it's so easy to copy the previous pages over.

I've split the gallery up into different subjects, each is a category. Mirror project and twop pixel challenges have their own category.

The main image is the Entry Body. The descriptive text the Extended Body and the thumbnail the Excerpt. Then it's just a question of using the proper tags to display on the main, category archive and individual archive pages.

For individual archive pages I took our the sidebar and moved the menu to the bottom of the page, making it less cluttered.

On the category archive pages I floated the thumnails. All thumbanil height is 100px but it's due to the different widths it doesn't look too great.

On the main index page I selected one image in each category and used that as the category attribute. I use the MTCategoryDescription tag to display and link to that category.

Only delicacies remain.

I got approved for obscured logs and verbosity, both webrings. I was checking, the previous and next links for obscured logs seem to be random links but for verbosity they're fixed. The previous verbosity is called heart failure by this 21 year old girl. The next link is someone's test blog. I'm a bit annoyed at that. And there's no link to the ring, which I think contravenes the rules?

I got a comment for quiet thoughts. Amazing. I did a trackback to Mena Trott's post on weblogging, I guess people do read her writings, seeing that she's co-founder of Six Apart afterall. I don't know whether the commenter came from the trackback or via the rings. I'm just glad someone's popped by.

Scary. It's like first night on stage, peeping my head out, trying not to get noticed, but wanting to be.

I did a couple of little something to see if I can get some traffic onto the site. Search engine submission places charge money, so that was out. Not that desperate.

I went over to ringsurf and looked at web rings. There were a few interesting ones, I put quiet thoughts on one called obscure logs — 300-odd members and quite a high hit count. There was another Buffy related ring that I was interested in, but when I clicked on random sites it kept bringing me to sites that either don't exist or very bare. The ringmaster at obscure seems much more on top of things.

I also updated the page I had at tripod with a stripped down version of the homepage. I'd forgotten I had a homepage at tripod, just figured I had the weblog. For a long while it was an under construction page, what an opportunity wasted.

Look and feel are the same, with the animated gif logo banner and sidebar. Wasn't sure if they supported php so I took out the includes and the random image rotator. At first I did an animaged gif of just 6 images but it turned out to be too big so I loaded a plain image instead. Links are all in place, pointed back here to the site. I took out hidden doors completely. Kept it simple, html but still css.

Repeated at geocities.

Figured, these are the 2 biggest free web page providers around, perchance someone might stumble across those pages and follow the links.

invisiblecompany.tripod.com
geocities.com/invisiblecompany

That's not cheating, right?

Gull's way is converted to MT. I dragged my feet on this one, never getting enough motivation to get started. It's getting towards the more complicated and tedious part of the website.

I've set each continent as a category and each place I visited an entry. Combine both text and photos in the entry.

It's just a lot of copying and pasting of existing text and images. Had to get rid of all the tables in the html version. I added a new class .floatcenter, it's not a float but the purpose is to center the images on the page. It's easy to do using tables but there's no such tool in css. The best I could come up with was to use text-align: center.

In the weblog I added a script from orange haired boy which password protects entries.

It involves setting a restricted category so all entries there need a password to get in. It has to be implemented on all pages that show individual entries, meaning main index and all the archive pages.

I also highlight weblog entries on the homepage, but I get a php parse error, probably because I'm trying to run a php script where part of it is on an include. I need to fit it.

Once the password is entered it works until cookies are deleted so I'll have to be careful about reading on other people's machines.

Cool script though.

It had to happen sometime. But as always it's at the most inconvenient time.

It was past 1am, I was tired, wanting my bed, the aircon in the bedroom is already on, cooling the room down. Impatient. But let me just do one final small thing. Add the menu to the bottom of the banner on each page. Easy cut and paste of a php command.

So I saved and rebuilt quickly, 3 sections in succession. No errors, everything was fine.

I clicked on quiet thoughts. What? Nothing below the banner was showing. Reloaded the page. Still blankety blank. Tried shiny parts. Tried innermost. Nothin'. Okay, now I'm awake.

Went back to check the index template. Head fine, script fine, banner fine, then the rest of the page was blank. So somewhere between cut and paste and save and rebuild the rest of the template got deleted.

I'd done a sync between the server and the computer so I thought, ok, just copy over. But of course the index.php that was saved on the computer had actual entries, not tags.

Hokay. Time for bed. I'll deal with it in the morning. At worst I'll just have to recreate the template, luckily the entries weren't lost, the archive pages were fine.

So that's what I did this morning. I created a new weblog and copied the default index template. Made changes, like date format, posted in categories, sidebar. I'm so glad the sidebar links are includes, otherwise I would have had to type them in again. Phew.

Happy now.

I made a colophon.

What is a colophon? In book publishing terms it's the page that has information on author, title, publisher and dates published/reprinted. In web terms it gives information on the systems and resources used to create and maintain a website, like what software, hardware, scripts, servers and other "interesting" tidbits.

Basically, it's the long winded and really-boring-unless-you-get-the-inside-jokes credits page. The type to sit through to the end of a film to see who was second second second unit director? The type who would understand.

It's really more self-congratulatory than informative. It's cute, if you're into that sort of thing.

How does it sit with the faq? Kinda side by side but with a fair bit of overlap. The faq has a more edgy tone, the about page is more dry.

I'm using MT to power shiny parts, so updates are in weblog format. I created a new weblog in the MT edit menu and copied the templates over from quiet thoughts. I'll also be moving the technical entries over from quiet thoughs to shiny parts. While I'm at it I'm switching the pages to php.

There will be a few pages within shiny parts that are not inside MT, like the sitemap, siteplan and old homepages. They'll just sit in the folder.

Yet another page converted to php and, look, no tables!

I've been reading up a lot on MT, CSS, php and learnt a great deal. Some people power their entire website on MT. I've decided not to do that 100%, because some of it doesn't sit in a weblog interface environment. Also I have Dreamweaver, and I'm beginning to handcode some pages, so I don't need to rely solely on MT. Even though I think the people who do use MT all through their sites do so because they are so good at it.

The biggest advantages are: consistency, structure and the ability to update using a web interface. I like it.

But as usual, once I discover something it changes and something which may be perceived to be better comes along. Just after I get properly started on MT, and I'm on MT 2.661, they announce MT3D, a developers edition of version 3. Lots more new stuff, but at a price. They've just today announced they are revising the pricing structure, still it's $70 for a personal license, that provides support and is limited to 5 authors. It's a better deal than the first pricing proposal, which limits the number of weblogs also. If the no. of logs are limited, people like me won't then have the luxury of using one log per section.

Then after reading up more, I discover WordPress. Sigh. Just great.

Added a sitemap. List of every page on the website by section. With links. Not to be confused with the siteplan, which is the hand drawn design.

140+ pages. And I made them all myself. Wow.

Update personal page. I don't like the way 15 Dec 2003 looked, so I waited till it was the end of the month, so recent entries were all in the 20-29 range. I'm strange that way.

Nothing too new, I wonder why I keep updating. I think I'm becoming bolder in what I put on various places on the website. Can the website withstand the "your Mom accidentally coming across it" test? Probably not. I mean, nothing incriminating, merely embarassing. But I'm not a teenager anymore, I need to be more sure of who I am and what I'm about.

Added 30-odd songs to musicality. I really have to think of a better way to handle this page, it's becoming a monster.

Added Africa trip to gull's way. Total 5 pages and over 100 photos. Not difficult but time consuming. We took something like 900 photos so it took a while to sort, select, scan, photoshop into web friendly format.

Writing it up wasn't hard, it was a trip full of new experiences. First reaction over at quiet thoughts.

Brought in hidden doors, now on the menu. Why hide? Nobody reads this website anyway.

I've been writing and writing but also changing a lot. One of these days I'll go and publish one of these fics on one of the writer's guild sites or the board. Then I can't play around and change the parts anymore. But that's exposure, and putting my work up for public scrutiny and I'm not sure I want that.

Updated personal page.

Tweaked homepage, put the crystal ball image on the left and took out menu bar. Doesn't look right though. I'll leave it for the time being.

Redesigned innermost room. Each story, essay or poem now comes with the first few lines as description. Looks a bit cluttered.

Need more thought and work.

Updated personal page. New thoughts after the Africa trip.

Added Shanghai trip to gull's way. It always takes time after a trip to get the photos, sort them and then write it up.

Changed world map on the main page to one that shows which countries I've visited, I made it at world66. It's cool.

Updated musicality, lots of new songs now on the iPod listed. This is one of the most difficult pages to make and maintain. First of all I don't have Office, andthe full listing downloaded from iTunes was too big to open in Simpletext, I had to email to work and open in Word and Excel. Then send back home an abridged version to copy and paste.

Never liked frames but for this page it's necessary to keep the table title in a constant place. But to align the frame header with the frame body was a frigging nightmare.

Everytime I add new songs to the iPod I have to update the full list and the playlist. A small part of me thinks it's a bad idea to have this section, but it's what's important in my life right? So I can't forget about the iPod can I?

This is probably the last update in 2003. What a year.

New version of the personal page is up. It's been 2.5 months, time for an update. Originally I intended the first page to have a full slate, ie all 25 squares filled, then with updates I may include or exclulde some of the squares. But I changed my mind, so I've included all squares.

Added hidden doors. Where is it? That's the idea isn't it? It's hidden away although there's a link somewhere from the homepage. Where I keep deeply personal stuff. Um, not really personal, just fanfic. Image is one of those fairground rides that make me dizzy just looking at it, how it relates to fanfic ... well it doesn't.

Added faq. Tone is a bit rude I admit, but what the hell. I know the answers but how do I know what the questions are?

Took out mailto link on homepage to prevent email harvesting. Contact details are somewhere in the faq, where a human can understand it.

The travel section is up at gull's way. Where does the name come from? It's been in my mind since I was young, one of those that came to me suddenly and stuck around. Mostly pictures I don't really know what to write.

It's so clichéd isn't it, every personal webpage has a My Travels section. They usually also have ubituitous My writing and My Pictures sections too. I hate being normal and boring like that. It's so frustrating.

What's left? Finish miscellaneous section, invite members to join, do an faq and start on restricted section. Oh, and move the weblog. Still a fair way to go.

Completed about 75% of delicacies & frivolities which, for want of a better description, is the catch-all miscellaneous section for various homes, food, iPod and other stuff that's important to me.

habitat
Where I put floorplans of the places I've lived in, it was something I started when I moved to NY, to show friends and family how my apartment looked like. I have to be careful to keep to the theme of this section and not digress into travelogue and pictures which needs to go into the travel section. So far only NY and Zurich are finished.

musicality
My mp3s. When I downloaded the full list it was too big to open in Simpletext so I had to email it to work and sort it out in Word and Excel. Sigh. I really have to succumb to prejudice and get Office at home. This is the only page with frames, not keen on them but I need to show the title of the list. Split the entire list up according to playlists, cos that's how I think of how the iPod is organised anyway.

use your loaf
This is a favourite phrase of ours at work right now. Loaf of bread is rhyming slang for head, so use your loaf means use your head dummy. Hee. Anyway it took me the whole day to organise and type out the recipes and I was quite tired of it at the end. Should be useful though, no need to flip through books, magazines or notebooks. Can send to other people easily as well.

drive
A picture of the Golf, that's all.

Last night I started work on the travel section. Lots of photos to organise and diatribe to write. Started with Hokkaido cos it's the most recent trip and the one where I had the most pictures (we took nearly 10 rolls of film altogether). Even with splitting the trip to 2 pages and trying to trim down the size of the jpgs I need to test how it would load on a 56k connection. This whole travel section will probably end up bigger that I expected.

As if it matters. Website is currently at 6MB, I have 327MB left. It's a no brainer.

Some weekends I'm so busy I don't have time to fire up the machine. Others are so free I do nothing but sit in front of the screen all day. This weekend was a mixture of both. Saturday I was out virtually all day and I only had a 30 minute window which I used to look at scanners. Today was a productive day. Added a couple more pages.

Stained glass window of our soul
Finally, some pictures. Lakes. Mountains. Coastlines. Houses. Collected over the years. No portraits yet. I don't have any with people I think can be added here.

Took a whole day to sort out these babies. Resize. Layers. Adjust curves. Make thumbnail. Combine to make image map so the first page doesn't take forever to load on slower machines.

First uploade has 21 pictures, one html page per image. Now you know why it took all day.

Sum of all shiny parts
Derived from "the sum of all parts". Image of various macs layered in Photoshop and made into an animated gif in ImageReady.

Mainly a log for myself to follow the progress. And to show technical stuff. Yes people, there is a master plan of sorts.

Initial results were not good, text size too big, wrong font on display, wrong position on screen, crappy table format. So I knew I had to bite the bullet, switch to a newer version of Dreamweaver and learn CSS. I know, I know, I'm so far behind the times I'm only now learning how to use style sheets? Would I be a misguided, overly proud person if I said I managed to learn the basics in one afternoon? Alright, I'm not an expert but I got the results I wanted. The price is I have to re-do every page I'd done so far.

Homepage
The image on the top right that looks like two hands around a shiny light crystal ball is a photo I had since forever, I think it's an overexposure at the end of a roll of a film. It's a real, untouched photo. I'm using it as my logo. The logo itself was constructed using a program called TOFFY at my previous company.

The photo on the left is of Luzern in Beautiful Switzerland. Unfortunately this will not be the last time you'll hear me pronounce my profound adoration of Switzerland.

Messages from the innermost room
The title came from some lyrics I wrote a long time ago. The lyrics weren't very good but I like the title. The photo of the boat was taken in the Lake District and overexposed on photoshop.

At some stage of a friendship I will ask a friend what they really wanted to do if they didn't have to work and money wasn't an issue. For me, the answer is to write. I don't pretend to be a professional or even an amateur with a modicum of talent. All I know is I need to get the thoughts and feelings out of my head. Most of my writing was done in a splurge when I was in college, as soon as I started working I found it difficult to tap into the proverbial creative wells. No big surprise, I'm as normal as the next person.

One of the reasons behind getting the website going again is to get all the random bits of paper floating round into one place in the hope that I can work on them. Recently getting into fanfic helps in the motivation factor also.

Started work on homepage. In continuous change. It's the most important page so I need to put most work into it.

Personal page is a collection of little bits about me yet they don't reveal too much. Title comes from my desire to include hangups (paranoia) and other stuff (paraphernalia). Image is of the beach chair in Nice plus a diffusion filter.