02 April 2005 Saturday

ferrydust version 2 is under composition. goodness knows how i’m going to end up successfully combining the two.

24 March 2005 Thursday

Current truth, looking toward fdv2

i want to revamp ferrydust. i like it enough, and it’s my house, but i’ve never really felt completely moved in.. so i guess it’s not really home yet. it’s like having the wrong notebook. with the right notebook, you’ll write in it. with the right website…i’ll write in it. it’s possible, anyway. wonder when i can get to really redoing it.. i think it’ll have to be from scratch; holding on to many of the existing elements, since there’s reason they were here in the first place.. but will have to ground- up. not “ground up”.. but from ground.. to up.

08 March 2005 Tuesday

1haiku

1haiku.com is up..

after about a year of knowing how i wanted it to look, and having tried sort-of-successfully but unsatisfiedly to get it the way i wanted, i finally revisited it a few days ago and redid the whole thing..
same intended design, but redid the html and css and put it into Textpattern this time. i’d initially tried it with Wordpress, because i needed two key features: user self-registration and random articles. ultimately, a self-registration mod (thanks Manfre :)) was developed for Textpattern and i twisted a few things and managed to get the random feature i’d wanted.

so, it’s up and working and i’m already really pleasantly surprised by the poems coming in; some are thoroughly entertaining, some are intriguing—but i wouldn’t have gotten to see any of them if this site wasn’t there for me to ask people to post to, neh?

so.. i don’t need to be up til 4am tonight; i’m going to bed..
come daylight, it’ll be time for me to get back to doing all the important things that actually really need doing. but i really needed to get this done, for myself.

goodnight

30 November 2004 Tuesday

Textpattern Resources

Slight renovations… most notably a signficiant paint job and shiny new head ornament. Not a moment too soon… looking back on it, I’m extra-impressed that the Textpattern community seems to have embraced the site, even as it looked as it did…. *shrug* then again, maybe people won’t like the site now that it’s all…. blue.

if a styleswitcher were built in, this would not be a problem.

should be moving to textpattern.org soon..
i’m really glad it’s seeming to serve its purpose.

And the additional people who have begun collaborating on it… that’s almost definitely the best part for me. Creating great projects, cooperatively. :)

12 November 2004 Friday

Sucky suckerfish

Actually, I think Suckerfish is really quite wonderful. I’m just a bit disappointed and frustrated (the fault’s certainly more mine) that I’ve not been successful in applying it to work for me. Same with the textpattern calendar plugin I’ve been wanting to put back on my site for a while.

I spent a lot of last night trying to get Suckerfish Dropdowns to work on my top navigation.. as I’ve intended to do since the start. thing is, I fully wanted it centered, and I’m happy with the column it’s in being a dynamic width. But the Suckerfish technique seems to depend for its entire existence upon float:left (or :right). And that just kills everything. It’s a deal-breaker. I will give it another try at a later date. I really did spend a whole lot more time on that last night than I should have even bothered to. But I was waiting anyway. There were other things I should have/would have done instead.. I guess I’ll have to hope to do them today instead.

30 October 2004 Saturday

Opening the doors..

Well, that’s it. As far as I can tell, the navigation and layout and various cogs are each moving the way they should be… So…a little bit nervously…I hereby dub this site “Alicson’s homepage” and open the doors to visitors.

Welcome, and I hope you enjoy your visit.

29 October 2004 Friday

It's about time...

It’s about time that this site is looking and working most of the way it’s supposed to…

and

...it’s about time that I go to bed.

I’m going to have a sleep hangover. Sucky. But actually feeling pretty good about this whole ferrydust site thing…

Next (tomorrow): change output of articles in Words section be by excerpt, and have only individual articles show the full texts.
also, start bringing over every single piece from the old cytizen/aim site so that it’s all in one good place…finally!

And then… Alicson will finally have her own homepage!

IT’S ABOUT TIME!

27 October 2004 Wednesday

Status updates

okay… so i’m at a little bit of a sticky point because it seems that importing all the previous entires from the ferrydust.goodgrape site may turn out to be trickier than i had thought. i’m not worried yet though… those geniuses over in the forums may bestow
instructions upon me yet.

anyway, i’m not necessarily entirely ready for all the old entries to come in yet.. i’ve not yet done anything toward creating an archive page or anything organizational and navigable like that. so that’s next.

if the outcome of tuesday’s election goes the wrong way i will very seriously consider leaving this country for a while, and moving as much of my family out as i can.

we (family) celebrated my brother’s birthday on Monday. he’s bashful and friendly and family-oriented at times like that. i’m glad the pants fit..i’ve never bought guys pants before.

if you eat too many [orange] tic tacs at once, it burns your tongue. that’s not new knowledge, though..

holy *#$&*! (is ‘cow’ a bad word? why’s it cow, anyway? what about ‘holy badger!’ or ‘holy potato!’ or is it the ‘holy’ part that’s bad?) there’s a new jimmy eat world album? coolio.

should: more sleeping at night and out of bed earlier and less staying up so so late and getting a sleep-hangover in the late morning.

26 October 2004 Tuesday

ferrydust Gallery

At this point, I don’t think the Ferrydust gallery is going to happen until Ferrydust v2 comes out… but existing photos/galleries are still available upon request.

Colophon

This was the Colophon for ferrydust as of late October 2004. It has been retired since late April 2005.

Welcome.

ferrydust, is hosted by TextDrive and powered by TextPattern (1.0rc1). HTML and CSS composition is largely done through EditPlus (the best notepad I know), and sometimes simultaneously through Crimson Editor. My weapon of choice is a Toshiba Satellite 5205-s703.

Now…
Once upon a time, there was a site named rasasayang.net, that looked similar to the site you see now. It was powered quite happily through MovableType. Ultimately, there was a big hullaballoo involving new licensing.. my brief personal stance on it is that there should have been more communication with the MovableType community on the part of Six Apart. I’m with TextPattern now, more than any other reason, because of the sense of community I saw in the TextPattern and TextDrive forums, and the good impression I had of Dean. I did sign up with TextDrive before my first installation of TextPattern ever happened. That was a circumstance of really fortunate timing and a simply good decision.

You may see reference to this site dating back to 2002… ferrydust began in 2004 and ‘opened’ on October 29. However, I have tried to consolidate as much of my past web entries/presences as possible, such as from xanga and cytizen/aim, and the ancient omniali site (which actually dates back to about 2000). All of those were always waiting for me to get it together and actually build one fairly comprehensive personal homesite for myself. That almost happened with rasasayang, but it didn’t. And one day ferrydust was finally born.

Individual article hit counts are as of 20 February 2005.

The whole lavender/lilac theme is entirely based on a single photograph, mutated through hand illustration and our dear friend Photoshop, and a supporting role played by Adobe Illustrator.

This site will look a bit different in IE (and MyIE2) than in the other browsers, because IE is less intelligent and I had to adjust several pieces of the layout to its personal comprehnsion. Hopefully, I got it reasonably right.. Please do let me know if you are viewing something atrocious in your browser; I’d like to fix whatever I can. FYI, my browsers of choice are Opera and Firefox, with MyIE2 (now called Maxthon.. but I’m in denial) to capably manage those unfortunate instances in which an IE browser is necessary.

That was a hodgepodge of info, neh?