In case you dropped by sometime yesterday or today and noticed the place was a little snarly, I had to tinker with some stuff under the hood. Not to bore you with uber-g33k stuff, but I upgraded the WordPress engine that runs my little G-spot here (yes, that was a pun–flog me with a wet noodle, ’cause I’m all about flogging the blog), and put up a static splash page, so the site has room to grow.

Anyway, things should be shaking down just fine again from now on. The upgrade went smoothly and I learned that my HTML skillz, while not so mad anymore, are still adequate enough for simple stuff. This from a former hard-code head who believed that using anything other than notepad to code the page diluted the purity of the code, man.

Of course, I make no promises about the blog skin. I’m still playing around with blog couture. If I’d had a WordPress blog when I was nine, Barbie wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much of my parents’ money as she did. I’d much rather play dress-up with my blog than with my Barbies any day.  And your pervy little brother can’t put your blog in compromising positions with GI Joes.  There’s always a downside.

I had so much fun SEx Blogging Saturday over at Silver Expressions!  It was actually a pretty remarkable thing, since my laptop (aka, my outside-brain) was on the fritz and well, being Frankensteined by Mr. Xandra at the time.  But since I did sorta plan ahead, I had drafts of posts prepared, and used the BFGaming Computer to post my posts and read/respond to comments.  If you actually come to this blog to read, thank you for reading!  And if you commented over at SEx, thank you, too!

But I’m now proud to say that I’m back on Ol’ Sparky, live and Open Source.  I’ve discovered a freedom to Linux that I don’t think I had with Windows since the days of 3.11.  Customization, lean and fast operation, FREE.  Secure.  I’m so diggin’ this.

…but it got eaten by stupid Windows security updates that oh-so-helpfully restart your computer when you’re not looking. This is the third time this has happened to me. Fortunately, this time, I’d saved the truly important stuff–my writing–so I didn’t lose much. Still, I had a really interesting post that went into my first experience with the editing process, and how familiar-yet-strange it seems. But it’s like messing up the punch line to a joke and then trying to retell it. It just doesn’t work the second time around.

So…long story short, I was amazingly surprised at how easy the edits for Alien Communion went. And exceedingly grateful that my own efforts led to it being a very clean story before being initially submitted. I was able to make my corrections, and even continue tightening in the vein suggested by the editor, and send them back to her in a week. Which, considering what my home life has been like, is kind of a feat.

Losing a blog post isn’t as narsty as losing a day and a half’s worth of writing–and yes I know, save early, save often is a mantra worth chanting. But having anklebiters underfoot means a lot of the time, that silence between the crash and the scream has to be spent running to the scene rather than clicking “save.” But you know, it’s not the saving or not that gets me. It’s the fact that random updates will seize control of my computer and either nag me until I bow to their will, or sabotage my authority. All because their software/platform is highly exploitable.

So that’s it…I’ve made the decision and I’ve had enough. I’m gonna make the jump! I’m moving to Linux

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m no big fan of dressing up. My usual uniform is jeans and t-shirt, or cargo pants and t-shirt. Unless, that is, I’m in the other extreme of wearing medieval garb or dressing as an alien. Then, of course, all bets are off. I’m a mother of young children, and anything I put on is going to get messy in the course of the day.

Dressing up on the web, however, is a completely different story. I think I’m a terminal fashion victim when it comes to website design. Perhaps it’s because for years, site design, like my writing (I was a tech writer) had to be functional before it had to be artful. Plus, it had to use a lot of corporate doublespeak and company logos, so the artistic side of it just couldn’t get creative. The mindset was that usable and pretty could never cohabitate functionally. I say nay (and did say nay at the time, too, but functional and pretty were both high-maintenance princesses, so the words “over” and “budget” were frequently the wacky sidekick pair.  Of course, that time in my life taught me a lot about clean writing, so I walked away from the old life with some valuable, if painful, lessons.
Now I’ve got my chance, though. I’m determined to make Xandragregory.com the functional and lovely site I know it can be in my heart. So the changing fonts, graphics, and layout may hurt a little…

since I’ve blogged…but in playing with the fun new shiny, I kinda got sidetracked into loading XAMPP on my laptop and faking an apache server and MySQL database so that I could test-drive the bazillion wordpress themes I’ve been teasing and tweaking and trying to emulate without looking like a schizophrenic with serious colorblind issues. And depending on how I like what I do on my laptop, I might just end up junking the wordpress install and redoing it in its own directory. If I can find the tutorial. And understand it.

Some days I feel like I’ve got two brain cells, only one of them’s dying and the other bravely went for help.