pavona's diary

04a 04b 08 10 11 14 20

As per the brief status update I posted, although this site is only just gone two months old and has very little content (archived updates, the haikus and one short story, pfah), I'm doing a serious overhaul now before it gets away from me too much.

There are orphaned pages (from sections I was going to merge, then forgot what I was doing, or simply lost interest in) which either need to be deleted or actually included in the general stream of things so as to make sense or at least be of passing interest. There's all the stuff I've started and changed my mind on several times, so now there are images and/or stylesheets uploaded to the wrong folder(s), and I've discovered I can't delete a folder that has files in it, and deleting files one-at-a-time is horrid tedious, so at best I can rename those folders to make them as good as "hidden" while I sort out the mess I've made of them.

Meantimes I'm still trying to finish the redesign for the front page, which might or might not include a simplified site map in the sidebar or header (with a more complete one in its own page, and that linked from all major pages rather than only linking "home"). Archived updates will keep their existing design (I just have to untangle the mess I've made of the stylesheets). I hoped to have significant progress to show by the weekend, but given what happened today, that's now unlikely (details to follow later, eventually, whenever).

In the process of cleaning up the little bitty bits of miscellany, I've completed one utterly unnecessary project ("unnecessary" as in "technically not the slightest bit urgent"), which was to make some buttons/badges for Bill's JAUP membership/award thing. I had made a few, experimentally, for myself, because none of the ones he had up already quite fitted with my front page redesign (dimension-wise or colour-wise), then I thought, hey, why not be full of myself and share them... So yeah. They're pretty simple (and yes, the letters are meant to be a little bit cut-off like that). I could have made them sharper but I wanted to get it done and be able to close photoshop after three days of messing about with umpteen gradients. There's a .psd if anyone wants to do more with them (make animated versions or whatever - just ask).

Right. So. Those buttons I made should, I suppose, be on a "proper" page, but they're only on a crappy placeholder template kinda page (although I did fancy it up the tiniest bit from the previous basic version). On the other hand, Bill's copied them to his site now so I'm just being full of myself again by even mentioning them. Scuse me while I go soak my head...

What else did I intend to babble about? Oh, yes, I decided to put permalinks in to the updates archives so I'm tediously doing that all manually (and getting confused and having to backtrack and check and doublecheck, then getting bored and going off and doing something else for a while, and coming back and being confused all over again). So there were things I was going to reference in this post but I can't yet because I need to have those permalinks done so I can link to the relevant past update post... gaaaaaah.

Still dealing with the itty bitty miscellany, I've made a neocitizens buttons links page (why not, just about everyone else has one, haha), partly because there are people whose sites have helped me one way or another (resources, or tips, or links to resources or tips) that I want to acknowledge, but whom I'm not following because perhaps the majority of their content isn't really my thing (a fandom I'm not familiar with, or music-based or video-heavy), or whatever reason (sorry about my grammar, I haven't slept and I'm really struggling to be coherent now, but I want to get a certain amount of things finished so I can do some offline things today). Um, where was I? Yeah... some people who follow me that I don't follow, or whose site has helped me, or whose postings in discord made me laugh... I wanted to have some way to acknowledge a bunch of people. So that's why that.

Oh! But!! There are quite a few people I'd still like to include but haven't been able to find buttons for. So either I might make interim buttons for those sites, or I might find buttons someone else has made for them. But feel free to ask to be added. :3

Also, for a change I managed to use someone else's layout without getting hopelessly stressed about the modification aspect (what usually happens when I try to adapt someone else's code). eggramen has several very nice templates available for others to use, and it's saved me losing my mind (again/more) trying to get a scrolly box to stay in the middle of the screen. I have made significant changes to the original code (html and css) but it's still recognisable as a derivative work. I shall be further modifying this for other sections (using different background images, fonts, colours, etc).

And before anybody asks, yes, the folder is called "imaage" deliberately (it's not a typo of "image"), and also yes, inconsistency with filenaming is also on purpose (plug-jaup.htm but buttons_page.htm) to make some page names harder to guess on the fly (for random visitors, not neocitizens). It's just one of my quirks/flaws hahahahaha ahem.

And speaking of inconsistency, and I've been meaning to bring this up for weeks but I keep forgetting; one of the reasons I like being on neocities is there's no pressure to have a uniform site design. I understand it can be annoying or even confusing/confronting for some people for a site to have a different design for each section (or even page), and for that I apologise, and I'm not doing it on purpose to detract from anyone's positive browsing experience. One of the reasons I haven't been able to stick to updating a "normal" site (eg wordpress blog) is I get bored with designs very quickly, but it's a major pain in the ass to keep changing something like wordpress (not to mention all the technical blarb one has to learn in order to make everything work how one wants it to). So sooner or later I get jack of it and oooh there goes another abandoned site into the void...
          *crickets*
If you're browsing on a desktop/laptop/netbook browser and you can see the title bar or tab title, you might notice that every title of every page on my site starts with "voov". That ties it all together. I'm not completely bonkers, I do have some organisational skills and understanding of navigation conventions. So, say, if you were to look in your history after perusing pages on this site, you could sort by "title" and everything would come up with "voov : something something" so ... that is how I justify my assorted design choices. The site name is in the document title. So... so there.

Gawd I'm tired...

I have so many things I want to say, I really need to do it now before I forget (and just in the time it took to open this file in notepad, I forgot two things already; hopefully they will resurface before I log off again).

Firstly, I never meant for this front page to resemble a personal diary. It was supposed to be code/design- and content-related notes, things like "added such and such page" and "horrible kludge of javascript on the gallery page but at least it displays now". Personal diary type stuff was supposed to go in /dire ("di-ree", bad pun for diary), but because I had about six different designs going and couldn't decide between them (not to mention the neverending javascript confusion), I never managed to write anything in that section the way I intended, and now all that's in there that counts as personal writing is the updates archives (this front page, for May and June). In part this is why I so desperately need to get the permalinks (and the jump-to links) into those pages - some of the entries I've written about personal things need expanding, or need backstory or notes or something, or I just want to put up some photos and be able to say "these were taken on X day when blah blah happened" and link to that post. But instead of finishing that, I'm doing this. But also because just after I logged off earlier today I remembered some things I had meant to say in that update, but which had slipped my mind because I was so agitated.

One thing I particularly wanted to remark on was how amazed I am to see how sharply my page views and follower count have gone up since I was on discord that first time. Given my site is only 2 months old, I should be super pleased (well, I am pleased, but I'm starting to get greedy now for follower no.51, which is just bad form). Aaaaand, given how little content I've got here, the increased traffic makes me a little panicky also, because I don't want to disappoint new visitors.

And on the subject of discord, can some of you nice peeps please tell me if it's a good idea (or not) to give my discord username on my "contact" page (which doesn't exist yet, but will soonish)? I haven't been on much since that first time, maybe four or five times, but I spend ages catching up on the messages since the previous time I was on, and then when I'm caught up, it's either all gone dead quiet or there are convos going on that I am not qualified to join. (One of my cousins does this hella annoying thing where she'll barge into a fb comments thread and give her unwanted opinion and/or talk about something unrelated to try to hijack the conversation; I do not want to be like that, so much as I might like to engage in a bit of social chat, I'm not going to interrupt "while the grown-ups are talking" ... except I think most of them are actually younger than me, haha.)

I'm pretty sure I'm not "required" (or even expected) to read everything that's happened since I was last on, but I'm always glad I did, and I've learned some interesting things and found some memes I was previously unaware of (I'm actually pretty clueless about memes generally) which have brightened my days. So I might spend 40 mins reading older messages, but not really contributing anything. I've been reacting to a few things but I don't want to do that too much and annoy people with "spamming" (I'm still not used to using that term to describe enthusiastic interaction). I have piped up a couple of times and said something I felt was worth saying, but it's always after the convo has moved on (because I've been reading the backlog) and I feel a bit intimidated about doing that (again because I don't want to be a nuisance).

I started the previous longwinded post but was too tired to finish it (literally could not see properly any more). Had to go out on Friday and got soaked because it rained heavily and my umbrella wasn't up to the task. Snivelled in bed on Saturday, even though the sun had come out and I would have been much better off sitting in the park, but I was tired and miserable and just couldn't face being seen in public.

Sunday I was mooching about on facebook and saw that my ex had been somewhere that was special to us, and irrationally I felt hurt that he didn't ask me to go along. I need a good shaking, or something. He's my ex... we still talk sometimes, but... what is wrong with me, seriously. (After that, lowkey stalked The Boy on fb but he hasn't posted anything this week, only been tagged in various sport-related posts by people he knows through work.)

Things I haven't done in the last few days: laundry, dishes, finished putting the permalinks into the archived updates, anything else. I've mostly slept, watched a bit of (mostly) crappy TV (but the David Attenborough repeats are always worth watching), and of course, ate too much (given I did nothing remotely strenuous in that time). And now Firefox has spent about 20 minutes seizing up and I had to close the instance through Task Manager because it was just hopeless. As long as I remembered to log all the tabs I had open (because history rarely works these days, and new bookmarks don't save at all), it will be okay, I just have to reopen them all.

My poor laptop. It's been in hibernation since early Friday morning, I think? And I come along and wake it up and expect it to perform immediately. Hah! If you woke me up and expected me to do anything more productive than blink and stumble around for half an hour, you'd be kidding yourself. Poor laptop. She probably needs a massive defrag or something.
*pats laptop affectionately*

The thing that happened last Wednesday, which is still bothering me, was having to listen to my brother-in-law denigrate my life for a solid two hours, while we were supposed to be watching my niece's (his daughter's) end-of-term musical, only we got there late (because he insisted he knew where to park, except he didn't, and ignored me when I pointed out three times there were huge signs saying where to go), so we had to stand at the back where I couldn't see much because I'm short, so he decided to "entertain" me by telling me everything I was doing wrong with my life and what I should be doing instead. I was in tears before he'd got halfway through his vitriolic rant, but that didn't stop him. And then I had to pretend to my niece that I was crying because I'd stubbed my toe and not because her father can be a right asshole.

I was on my way to see my GP this morning when a passing cyclist had a go at running me over. Cyclist stopped long enough to scream abuse at me (not that I was the one running the red light), then went on his way, leaving me sprawled in the road, the lights about to change, and a large truck revving menacingly. Nobody was close enough to help me up immediately so I frantically tried to drag myself at least into the gutter to get out of the way of the traffic. The truck driver wasn't paying attention (or maybe just couldn't see me) because he missed my foot, seriously, by maybe 5cm. Finally someone noticed I was bleeding on the road. Not serious enough to call an ambulance for but my fave leggings are ruined and my shin and knee are all scabbed up. Also bruised from ankle to thigh, and took skin off one palm and part of the wrist.

Got to my GP eventually. Had to take a taxi cos I couldn't walk properly. Sat on the floor and cried while they patched me up. Got another taxi home. I've recovered enough now to be angry, but there's nothing I can do, really. Everything hurts. Gonna stuff my face with pastrami (again) and plot death to arrogant assholes everywhere.

PS: no, of course I haven't finished any of the site mods; don't be silly.

I miss my mum. I wish I could see her every week but I feel a strong need to avoid other family so I only go when she doesn't have anyone else coming. Couple that with the unpleasant weather, shitty public transport and my generally lousy health, and it's difficult to coordinate for a date that suits. (I haven't told her about my leg yet because she'll just freak out.)

Meantimes... I've been working on a completely new design for the front/landing page. Rather than having all the "current" updates and having to keep shuffling posts to archive to prevent the page getting too long, it will be more decorative, give a feel for the site as a whole, have one or two brief updates (pointing to new content), a few external links (credits, Jaup, etc), and otherwise function as the site map. That's the plan... as usual I'm struggling with the coding part of the design aspects. I may have to give in and use tables (again), just to get it done, because again my css skills are awol. I know I used to be able to do this sort of thing but it's just not working now. Because of stricter browser standards, maybe? Or just my faulty memory... I don't know.

3:30pm ... and now that I want to upload some files, of course the internet is down. ⛔ 🤢

I've been going mad all week getting the recoding done. As I've said in a few places to different people, I stupidly made it over-complicated by planning too far ahead, being too ambitious, not uploading each little section as it was finished because I cross-linked all the new pages on all the new and other relevant pages, so almost everything has had to wait on almost everything else (and it's still not finished, omg).

Meantimes I accidentally deleted my diary entries for the past week because I am hecking stupid. I can recreate some later but they won't go in the chronology of this month, I'll put them somewhere else as "opinions" or something like that.

For August I'm doing a redesign to make navigating the diary much easier. It's just with the switch from blog-style "updates" on the main page to diary-style (earliest to latest, ascending order posts, blah blah) plus belatedly adding in the permalinks, the current layout's coding is complicated and messy and I need to streamline it for my own sake (I get so fed up with being confused). Had to forcibly stop myself from redesigning for July, because I already had so much to do that wasn't getting done.