I’m off to visit the family for a few days so will be incommunicado as far as this blog goes. I’d like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. Such a cliche I know, but I mean it.
I spent yesterday doing visiting while dropping off christmas presents. This now means that my house is a pigsty, that I was up till all hours wrapping presents, and hiding some.
The year’s not over yet and I want to do one of those yearly wrapup posts but in the meantime I’d like to thank my regular commenters and/or supporters in one way or another; Joy, Jeanie, Stacie, Megan, Leigh, Meg, Karen, Michelle, Hazel, and Snoskred.
It’s been an eventful year in a lot of ways and blogging has really helped me get through this year. I’ll be doing more of the why’s and wherefore’s in my yearly wrapup post.
In the meantime, try not to eat or drink to much over the next few days, and enjoy.
We ventured into the city this morning and went into the Central Market. Arriving absolutely drenched from the welcome rain we’ve had all morning, we walked to a couple of stalls and then I saw Santa accepting kids’ wish lists so I asked JJ if he wanted to see Santa. Of course he did so we lined up. Santa was very friendly and chatty to the kids in line before us and when JJ got on his lap he spoke so quietly (which is SO unlike him) that poor Santa had a hard time hearing him.
JJ told him that he’s made a list and he’s wishing for, a laptop, a ukulele, a scooter, snorkel and goggles and a real magic wand.
We walked off pretty happy with that and on our way to the last stop I realised that JJ wasn’t next to me. I looked around and saw a guy who’d obviously got in JJ’s way, or the other way around. Or at least that’s what I initially thought. This guy almost had JJ in a hug while trying to get around him which I soon realised was a bit strange. Usually if a kid gets in my way and I can’t avoid them because they aren’t looking where they’re going, I’ll say excuse me and maybe put my hand on their shoulder to let them know that someone is trying to get past. I won’t give them a full hug. JJ’s since told me that he was trying to get around this guy and this guy kept bumping into him.
This guy could see that I’d turned around and obviously knew I was the adult with the child he was hugging, or ‘bumping’ into to, and let him go. This could have all been quite innocent but I’m not usually given to paranoia and this felt like a strange incident to me. I reiterated to JJ that if he didn’t like the way that anyone touches him, to yell out for me, or to just yell.
Not to be content just looking at stats for my blog and my RSS feed subscribers, I can now look at stats for my Flickr photos. This was a new feature announced a few days ago on the Flickr blog.
I would have thought it would be announced on my Flickr homepage but I didn’t see it. Mind you it might have been there but I just missed it. The Flickr stats show me a daily graph with photo views then the stats get broken down to referrers, most viewed photos. I’ve often wondered where my photo viewers come from. Now I know. See help on how to get to your Flickr stats. Note this is only for Pro members at the moment.
It’s that time of year when we’re tired. I’m tired. JJ is tired. I think we’ll all agree that it’s frantic this time of year. School has broken up for the year and there was a big buildup to that with barbeque dinners, concerts, supervising writing of cards for classmates and buying a present each for the teacher and the school care person because they’ve both been fantastic. Unfortunately I’ve still got to work this week before we can both be on holidays for a while. I’m also tired because I’m doing a new job and I’m preparing for that conference I keep blathering on about.
So the tiredness kicks in and it means short tempers all round, around here. JJ has been whining and whining and whining on and off about really petty things and he’s not normally a whiner. The other day at the supermarket we’d finished doing what we had to do, we’d hopped in the car and and he still kept whining at me and I finally lost it and screamed ‘shut up’ at the top of my voice. As I said this, I realised my car window was wound down and there were people everywhere. Definitely not a good parenting look. Shamefaced and redfaced I calmly drove off.
Tonight I was out in the garden watering and JJ found a small foam ball that I think Monty had just dug up. It was the final straw for him and he lost the plot this time. Hmmm, wonder where he gets it from! He kept going on about how it was his favourite ball and Monty must have gone into his room and taken it to put in the garden. I tried to calm him down but nothing worked so I just let him calm himself down while staying very calm myself.
Afterwards he was back to the happy boy he mostly is and I managed to feed him, read to him, he read to me and I put him to bed the earliest he’s been to bed for ages.
I can’t wait until Thursday when it means it’s the beginning of four weeks off for us. There will be nowhere we have to be in the mornings and lunches won’t have to be made until we want to eat them. People have asked if we’re going away and apart from a couple of short trips, we’re not, and I’m really looking forward to getting up when I want, getting dressed when I want and just lazing around. Did I say I can’t wait?
We both need some time to decompress. How about you?
This is priceless. It was first sent to my via my email and then I happened upon the 7.30 Report the other night where a story was done about these dancers.
They are the Chooky dancers, a group of young Aboriginals from northern Australia.
Because of the video being posted to YouTube and their fairly instant notoriety they may be going to Greece next year and they sure know how to dance. They are also working up dances from other cultures which I can’t wait to see.
Direct link to Zorba the Greek Yolngu style.
I’ve been asked to present at a conference and as the time looms closer my foe – self doubt – is creeping in. I’m trying not to let it take over but it’s almost crippling me to the point of paralysis. I’m presenting on the importance of effective information architecture and I don’t want to regurgitate the mountain of information that’s already out there.
Even though I’ve nearly reached the point of paralysis about what to say, I have started putting notes together. Finding examples takes lots time so if anyone knows of any websites that present their information extremely well, or not, please let me know. As it is I will be finalising this presentation during my holidays which is not what I had planned.
Then of course there’s the delivery of the presentation. I have presented before, but don’t do it very often and haven’t done it for ages. I would rather get up and sing them a song than present to them. Having said that, I used to be scared of doing that but because I’ve done it a few times I’m not so scared now. Again, any tips here would be good.
In the meantime I’m well into my secondment at work and crossing my fingers that everything will work out okay there too.
All I can say is be careful what you wish for. If I remember rightly I was saying a few months ago that I was ready for a change. Now changes have been thrust upon me and it’s kind of overwhelming.
I’m hoping I will look back upon this time and think that I freaked out over nothing.
Karen at Misc Mum has asked for some WordPress help and feedback. I thought rather than just reply in her comments, I’d do a post incase others might find this type of information useful.
Some people have mentioned that they find the font too small. Indeed, I’ve had this thought too. Is there somewhere in the template pages that this can be modified painlessly and with little chance of me buggering everything up and leaving a Misc Mum hole in the websphere the size of Chernobyl?
Yes, this is really easy to do by editing the style.css file but before fiddling around with this back it up just in case.
In your WordPress admin, select Presentation, then Theme Editor as shown in the diagram below. (click to view larger image) The style.css file is the one that opens by default and this is the one that you have to edit to change the look of your website/blog. Look for the style about ‘body’. You might have to scroll down a bit but you will know when you see something under ‘body’ that has a font-size element included. The ‘body’ information in the diagram below is actually copied from Misc Mum’s site so if she changes .9em to 1em to start experimenting with her font size it should change the font size across the whole website.
I haven’t got admin access to Misc Mum’s website files, but anyone can see anyone else’s stylesheet information if they know how to look as it’s clearly defined within the <head> </head> tags of websites.
Important to note is that this can affect all the other font size styles across the website like headings, which she might not want to do. However, upon looking at Misc Mum’s stylesheet she has a ‘content’ div which as far as I can figure out defines how the content in her blog is displayed. The current content div looks like this (it’s also in the above style.css file):
#content {
float: left; width: 480px; display: inline; text-align: left; border-right: 1px dotted #4c7578; margin-top: 10px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; font-size: .8em;}
If she leaves the body font-size alone, and just changes the font-size in the content div above from .8em to .9em or 1em, then it should just change the information within the content section of her blog and leave most, or all, other font sizes alone.
When I’m editing my style.css file, which is what I did to considerably change my blog’s theme, I usually change one thing, save it, view the blog and see what else it has affected. I’m a big experimenter and as I said at the beginning, if you completely stuff up, then you’ve got your backup all ready to copy over the stuff-up so you’re back to square one.
Back to Karen’s feedback request, she says,
Adam thinks my sidebars are too cluttered. I went “Huh?” I thought they were okay.” What do you think?
Personally I’m in for a fairly clean look and this site does take a little too long to load for me at home with my not so fast broadband connection because of what has to load. I think it’s good that the content is on the left column because at least people can read this while the rest of the site loads.
Therefore I would suggest moving the ‘Proudly supporting’ graphics to a new page, perhaps the About me page? Also as bloggers get various awards, these can clutter up the sidebar too. I’d suggest as the awards are over, move them into their own page too. Personally if I want to find out more about a blogger I’ll go and read these pages to see what they’ve achieved and so on.
I note that there’s a blogroll on the main pages and Blogroll also has it’s own separate page. From a usability perspective this is immediately confusing because it’s not obvious if they’re the same or different, so I’d consolidate the Blogroll. Similarly is it necessary to have Quick archives in the sidebar when there’s an Archives link at the top? I’d also move the Site info to the footer.
Lastly, Karen asks about some plugins she’s using. I don’t use any of them so can’t comment, but if I can’t get a plugin to work I just leave it and find something else or just don’t bother. Keep in mind that some plugins are flaky and they can also add to the time it takes for a site to load so tread carefully with them.
I hope this information is useful and if anyone has any questions about it please let me know.
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