I’m try­ing NaBloPo­Mo again! The theme this month is “Return,” although I’m not at all sure what the heck that’s sup­posed to mean. I got today’s post in just under the wire, obviously—but I did post! Tomor­row I’ll try to do it much bet­ter. And I’ll even include pho­tos of the new kit­ten! Maybe he’ll have a name by then.

No, noth­ing like that!

I’ve been look­ing at Word­Press themes. Again. Lots of them.

I have lots of tuto­ri­als book­marked about cre­at­ing your own themes, too. I even have a cou­ple of books on the sub­ject.

One is quite new.

Dan­ger, dan­ger, Will Robin­son!

I’ve tried all the dif­fer­ent plu­g­ins that claim to work with Word­Press for cross-post­ing to Live­Jour­nal, but recent­ly I’ve got­ten errors from every­thing. I’ve asked for help from the authors in their forums and noth­ing seemed to be hap­pen­ing. And then I saw this: Banned Because of Live+Press’ Bad Behav­ior. That’s from the cur­rent main­tain­er of Live+Press, the plu­g­in I’ve had the best luck with over­all.

If you’ve vis­it­ed here once or twice, you might have noticed that lit­tle thingie over there in the left-hand bar that asks, “What should I write about?” There’s a link to Skrib­it, where you can leave sug­ges­tions about the types of posts you’d like to see here.

Well, you too can get such a wid­get for your blog! Because Skrib­it is out of beta! So go check out their site, and see how their tools can help you.

Does any­body know what hap­pened to Zooomr? They start­ed out as a promis­ing com­peti­tor to Flickr, and I recall hear­ing good things about their API. Katie, Sam, and I joined back in 2006 when they were giv­ing away free, life­time Pro accounts.

I had linked to a pho­to on their servers in an old blog post, and noticed today that the link was bro­ken. I logged in and found that my account is un-Pro now, though Katie’s and Sam’s seem to have retained their Pro sta­tus. All of my pho­tos and my pro­file info are gone. Katie’s pro­file is blank. She seems to have one pho­to there, but I can’t open it. Sam has a few pho­tos, but again, I can’t open them.

I emailed tech sup­port, but I was think­ing maybe some­one else had heard some­thing about the com­pa­ny that might be help­ful. I did notice that they seem to be asso­ci­at­ed with Zoho, and when you email tech sup­port a copy goes to a “feed­back” address at a .jp (Japan­ese) domain. Their “help” info resides on a Zoho wiki, which was down when I tried to access it. (I can’t get to any­thing at Zoho, in fact — glad I don’t rely on them!)

Crunch­base seems to con­sid­er Zooomr a going con­cern.

I did more web­i­fy­ing today, and got all hap­py because I resolved a tem­plate prob­lem. I don’t “know” php, as in I don’t write my own scripts. I’m learn­ing more and more about it work­ing with oth­er peo­ple’s tem­plates, and have got­ten to where I can mix and match from dif­fer­ent tem­plates to get the effects I want. I also spent some time in mysql, try­ing to clean up some of this site’s tables to make it load faster.

I also read a lit­tle, and I’m real­ly, real­ly try­ing to fin­ish the book I’m on before div­ing into the deli­cious stack of books my sweet­ie brought home from the library for me. I wrapped up the week’s class assign­ments, too. I want­ed to stitch, but I was attacked by a rogue nap.

My project man­age­ment teacher released the study guide for the final, which is 3–4 weeks away (you can do it any time dur­ing week 8, and we just fin­ished week 4). Um, does any­body real­ly study that far in advance? I’ve nev­er been very dis­ci­plined about study­ing.

Sam is edit­ing a chap­ter of Fledg­ling, which he re-record­ed because he was dis­pleased with the sound qual­i­ty. He edit­ed Square One ear­li­er. Sor­ry, Hope, but I don’t think he got to record the lat­est chap­ter of Heart of the Hunter 🙁

It’s still Feb­ru­ary, right? The tem­per­a­ture was way up in the 70s today! It’s back down to 50 now—outside. Inside, the temp is still too hot for sleep­ing com­fort­ably. Pout.

Are there any Word­Press geeks read­ing this? I could have sworn that I saw a plug-in that allowed com­menters to send a pri­vate mes­sage to a blog’s own­er, sort of like hav­ing com­ments screened in LJ except that the own­er does­n’t ever (could­n’t, as I under­stand it) make the “whis­per” pub­lic. I can’t find such a thing in the offi­cial plu­g­in repos­i­to­ry at WordPress.org, though. Any­body know of such a thing? I don’t want to use a com­ment form, because of secu­ri­ty con­cerns.¹

My cre­ative time today was spent web­mistress­ing. I tweaked some Word­Press tem­plates to work bet­ter, and moved more stuff over from my old site for­mat to Word­Press. It may not seem like much, but I always rewrite and update as I do that, so I fig­ure it counts.

Sam and I had lots of fun in our game tonight. It’s a lit­tle weird to real­ize that some­one is an avatar of a deity and that not only does he not know it, he’s nowhere near ready to real­ize it. Then there’s the whole issue of not let­ting that lit­tle fact slip at all, because an entire race of peo­ple is wait­ing for his return (and they real­ly, real­ly need him now, of course).

I real­ly should go to the library tomor­row, but I don’t know if Sam will have time to dri­ve me there. I have books to return and books on hold to pick up. I’d best go to bed now, to improve my chances of wak­ing ear­ly enough to ask him.

I need to give Kioshi some extra scritchies, though, and I’m think­ing about Jen and her fam­i­ly, who had to let go of their newest feline fam­i­ly mem­ber today—he had feline leukemia. I always think of our Andre and Tom-Tom when­ev­er feleuk comes up. I’m glad Kioshi did­n’t catch it from his par­ents, as our babies and theirs prob­a­bly did. Please, vac­ci­nate all of your pets! Even if you don’t ever plan for them to go out­side!

I know that Hope and Juliann are doing it—anybody else? Any oth­er Blog365 par­tic­i­pants should note that it will be a great source of blog ideas, and I know we all need those at this point.

I got through NaBloPo­Mo, as ridicu­lous as it was to com­mit to post­ing at least once a day for a month. So of course that small suc­cess has led me, in a moment of more-than-usu­al-luna­cy, to sign up for Blog365 (oth­er­wise known as “Out of the Fry­ing Pan, Into the Fire”).

The pur­pose is fair­ly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. Feb­ru­ary 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be writ­ten on any site, rather than stick­ing to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get some­thing on the actu­al site on a par­tic­u­lar day due to net con­nec­tion issues or what­ev­er, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or some­thing!) a jour­nal entry and trans­fer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far sim­pler to have a sys­tem of some sort. Maybe I’ll cre­ate a rota­tion:

• Fibrant Liv­ing — health, liv­ing with a dis­abil­i­ty, pod­casts
• Acad­e­my Car­i­tas — home­school­ing, edu­ca­tion, col­lege
• House Fire­heart — polyamory, par­tic­u­lar­ly my and Sam’s approach to it
• Heart­song Hand­i­crafts — home of my orig­i­nal needle­work pat­terns, and soon to be home for the rest of my stitch­ing infor­ma­tion
• Cyber­stalked! — inter­net safe­ty and pri­va­cy issues
• Cyn­thia Armis­tead — my pro­fes­sion­al port­fo­lio, where I put the geeky stuff
• Ene­my of Entropy — here, of course, where I put gen­er­al stuff, book reviews, and the like.

Hope­ful­ly there will be new pod­casts up soon. There will def­i­nite­ly be more music, as we have that love­ly con­cert piano we received via freecy­cle all repaired and put togeth­er. It’s beau­ti­ful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one dri­ve to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam want­ed to just take it to the near­est autho­rized repair cen­ter rather than doing it our­selves.)

2007 was­n’t a stel­lar year, but nei­ther was it ter­ri­ble. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an orga­ni­za­tion that’s allow­ing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health prob­lems, but I’m hop­ing that we’re on the right path to resolv­ing them. Shel­ley passed away a lit­tle shy of her 18th birth­day, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d got­ten an “extra” 8 years with her any­way. Kioshi has grown into a nice com­pan­ion, too.

We real­ly kept to our­selves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our for­mer house­mate’s sud­den crazi­ness in 2006, there’s a lot of heal­ing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanks­giv­ing with­out trep­i­da­tion again, but we had a good one any­way. The stress did con­tribute to the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of my health, and that does make it hard­er to get out. We’re work­ing on it, though. We cer­tain­ly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll nev­er for­get that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, bet­ter health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attend­ing as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gam­ing, upgrad­ing some web sites, eat­ing good food and watch­ing movies. If it’s true that what­ev­er you do on Jan­u­ary 1 indi­cates how your year will go, we should be just fine.

If you look way, way down the side­bar to see the cal­en­dar thingie, there’s at least one post on every sin­gle day of Novem­ber!