I have given in to temptation and started a tumblr.

emperatrix.tumblr.com: fortune cookie wisdom and tea time musings.

After what seems an eternity, I finally changed the layout of the Jareth Fanlisting. As the first fanlisting that I created (back in the days when the Fanlistings were just starting and Janine was running the show), this is the one that I’ve never wanted to give up… but I have been quite negligent in my maintenance. I’ve become a terrible fanlisting owner during the last few years, but real life really does put a damper on webplay and fandom.

Anywho, it’s a simple design. I’m just getting back to basics for a bit. The header needs work, but it’ll do.

If you’re a Jareth or Labyrinth fan, go get listed!

Changed things up a bit again. I fiddled with an old copy that I had of Teresa Jones’ Written theme  to come up with something simpler than what I was working on previously (haven’t linked to her site because it seems to have disappeared after some guy called Adam took over, McAfee signaled a malicious threat warning the last time I tried to visit). The teacup image is my own (and there was quite a bit of photoshoping to cut it out), courtesy of Auntie Em . The ribbon will be back some day, I just need to tweak it some more. The previous layout was never quite what I had in mind when I was first designing it; I just got fed up with it and threw it together, really a half-assed sort of job, but so it goes.

I finally took the plunge and purchased a domain name for my book blog, so now you can easily access things she read by going to things-she-read.org. I’m very pleased

Still not sure what’s causing the issue with the header, but I’m working on it…

[EDIT]

I think WordPress just likes messing with my mind, it appears to be fixed after deactivating one of my plugins, but is it really fixed?

The layout I’ve been toying with seems to be in working order, for the most part… for some reason the header sometimes shifts out of place when the page loads. I’ve had this happen using several different browsers, but I haven’t been able to find the cause. I have discovered that reloading the page fixes the problem, so it may just be a one time loading glitch If anyone else notices this, please drop me a comment!

The bow was one of my Illustrator experiments, though everything I create in Illustrator is an experiment. I’ve titled this one “Victorian Hatbox”. My original idea was to make it look like those large ribbons that always seem to wrap around hatboxes in period films.

Working on the site, so the layout may look a bit wonky at times.

[EDIT]

Gave up on OnePress I’m going to do this the old-fashioned css child theme way. Going to stick to the same layout for now… have to rethink the one I was working on.

I’m going to try WordPress’s automatic upgrade option… we’ll see how this goes.

[Edit]

It works! Wee! This is great I always screwed up manual upgrades, this is so much better.

I really must remind myself never to try to upgrade WordPress when I’m tired. I screwed up royally and the new FTP program that I was using kept acting buggy. Gave up and switched to my old client. Thank goodness it worked, I was starting to think I was going to have to resort to the backup I made after all .

This is a kind of confession and explanation. I had a discussion last night that got me thinking about why I find it so worrisome to have my “real life” friends read my posts, and why I prefer sharing random thoughts with people that I don’t really know.

After mulling this over for a bit, I now realize that it started when I was in high school…

I had a friend who introduced me to blogging and design. She and I worked on some silly little web-projects that never really took off, mostly because we kept arguing over what the sites should look like and who our co-authors should be. As a result, we both started individual projects of our own, ultra-bright badly coded sites on geocities, but we were only 16 and experimenting with html, so what did it matter. This was also around the time that livejournal was the big social networking medium. We each had accounts, but I never gave much thought to who was reading my entries. In other words, I didn’t think she was paying much mind to what I was writing.

It turned out that she was.

I wrote an entry about a particular event and she took offense. I felt that I was only describing my experience of the event and meant no harm by it. They were my views and I was certain that I was justified in expressing them.

Well, that friendship ended badly.

That’s when I started censoring what I wrote, not sharing my blog(s) with friends, and made my journal friends only (only to later start a new journal altogether in an effort to get away from that part of my web experience).

As some people know, I shut this site down for a while and only wrote on my journal. But I like to write, and I think of this blog as a kind of narrative exercise, just as my book blog is an exercise in writing about books (after all, I have a Lit degree, I should keep it up).

Yes, my worry is somewhat irrational. I am still worried that someone might react badly to something I’ve written, and I would rather it was someone I didn’t really know.