Surfacing for a few minutes to wave hello…

I feel like I’m disappointing all my readers! I know you’re there because I have LJ Stats. 🙂

Since my last entry, I’ve been cracking the mystery of customizing WordPress to perfectly match my websites. I’ve been 100% successful. Of course, I’m not opting for a lot of the fancy optional functions–I just want a basic blog. But after a certain amount of beat-head-against-wall, I figured out the essential procedure:

Download WordPress
Set blog to the “classic,” bare bones, minimal template
Throw just about everything in the template away and replace it with the styles and formatting from website

Voila! I’m still building the links list in BLU Media Blog, but I spent about a day and half figuring out how to customize my author blog, Rewriting the Rules. Then I spent about 35 minutes doing the exact same thing to BLU Media Blog because now I’ve got it down. I’m very pleased.

If you want to see how well I’ve matched the WordPress blogs to the websites, just go to the sites, take a quick look at their formatting, and then click on the blog link, which is at the right side of the top menu bar on each site.

Inanna Arthen dot com
By Light Unseen Media

Before I customized BLU Media Blog, I finished the re-coding of By Light Unseen Media’s website, which is much more complicated than my author site. It’s so much more complicated, in fact, that I ended up with The Stylesheet From Hell and was grumbling to myself about why I had to be so gosh-darned creative. *wry smile* But By Light Unseen Media’s website is really in good shape now. I’ve added review quotes and updates. I’m still tweaking it, though! It was a lot of work, because I was running all the pages through the W3C Validator tool to make sure they were fully xhtml-transitional compliant, and of course that caught every frellin’ little mistake I made, most of which the browsers didn’t care about, they parsed the pages anyway. But I wanted the code to be perfect–or why bother? I sure have learned the rules for xhtml, sheesh, not to mention improving my fluency in css.

But all that has been keeping me very busy the last few days. On Saturday, I caught up on a few chores I’d forgotten to do earlier in the week, and I did a Full Moon ritual before I went to bed. (The Full Moon was Sunday morning and I didn’t want to get up for it.) On Sunday, I went up to Nashua and ran errands because I needed bulk cat supplies, and I had a full agenda for Monday (yesterday, that is). On Monday, Dad finally came down to see the new computer that he helped pay for ( 🙂 Thanks, Dad!) and visit, and we had Chinese food (which was a mistake 🙁 ). Monday evening I had Parish Committee meeting. And my workouts are taking a bit more of my time now that I’ve ramped them up, especially the three Bowflex workouts.

Further update on the Account Cancelation Saga:

Yesterday, I went to the post office, and I finally spoke to the Postmistress (who, at 2:30 p.m., came to the counter bundled up in her coat, hat and scarf, I don’t know if she was coming or going!). All she knew was that my certified Priority Mail letter, which I mailed on Tuesday the 23rd, had arrived at the Leominster post office–or so Leominster said–at 4:47 a.m. Saturday morning. She didn’t have a clue where it could have been for four days. It would have gone down to Shrewsbury, Mass. and back out to Leominster (which is about eighteen miles from Pepperell). I think someone at the Leominster post office has the warmest, most well-covered ass in the Commonwealth. *wry look* But it’s all moot now. The letter was finally delivered yesterday morning, according to the tracking information. The annoying thing is that it was mailed three days before I spoke to Ms. Billing Department, and I hope it doesn’t create any confusion or changes in the terms I arranged on the phone.

But I’m going to send another letter–plain old snail mail–and I’m shipping back the modem tomorrow. I’m giving my dad a ride to the airport and I come home through Nashua, going right by the drop-off locations for both UPS and Fedex. I think I’ll do UPS, though, because I have an account with them and I can get the package all ready to ship, pre-paid, here at home. All I have to do is drop it off at Staples, they scan it and give me a receipt. I found the paperwork from when I first signed up for DSL with Net1plus, that lists the equipment I was given, and I’m sending a copy of that to prove that I’m returning everything.

I called Verizon today and disconnected the second phone line, so that’s done.

I’ve gotten the first purchase order from Brodart for Krymsin Nocturnes!