Hooray! Today is the day that the blog design is really done and I can stop messing with it for awhile. Most issues have been resolved and I’m finally very happy with the way this thingie both works and looks – even more so because I did it myself, and that’s a fun feeling. I spent a lot of money this summer on things I couldn’t afford, meaning a professional blog design got cut off the list. I was kind of jealous of the people who had such pretty pages on their own domain names and blog lust kicked in.

But self, I said, can’t YOU just do it? Come on, you had your first webpage on GeoCities and you were messing with basic html when you were 14. You at least knew how to work with if not write javascripts a year later. You can speak binary. Heck, you’re one of the 17 people in the world who remembers what a BBS is because you actually used one. And you have impeccable design skills, really. You can read a book about how to do this and the Intertubes will tremble.

And really? It’s not that hard! I got this guy…

and dedicated a lonely Saturday night to a date with my shiny new laptop. I signed up for a domain name and basic hosting with Tigertech.net and thank you baby Jesus, they pretty much dummy-proofed the startup process for me. Everything in the Dummies book correlated nicely with the way Tigertech has their user page set up. I knew exactly where to go to do my PHP thing and my MySQL thing and all the other thingy-things. Don’t ask me what those are, I just did them AND I DIDN’T HAVE TO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TO DO IT.

The Dummies book recommended several FTP programs (file transfer protocol, I knew that one! It moves files from your hard drive to your host server). I chose one called FileZilla. Since the book and my server were so helpful, it was really easy to get my FTP set up.

I installed the Wordpress.org design and editing software because it runs like good old Wordpress.com and has so many built-in options for customization. They advertise a 5-minute install for the software and the kids are not lying. Simple. If you’ve used Wordpress.com, you’ll love how similar it is to what you’re used to. And if you’ve used Blogger (and I have, so I can say this), you will worship its superiority.

But then came the scariest step. I had to move the blog. All the content, all my writing, the good, bad and ugly of three years just HAD to make it with me in the transfer. I was scared. I ate a peanut butter cup to calm down. The Dummies book spelled it all out for me though, how to export from Wordpress.com and import to Wordpress.org. The book also includes instructions on how to move blogs from Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and I think a few others. It worked! My posts, my categories, my pictures, my blogroll, everything imported. Not all platforms will import EVERYTHING, categories and whatnot, but the book explains it further,

CAVEAT: Four posts randomly went missing, and I only noticed because my post count at the old host was 4 more than my post count after the import. Check this before you delete anything from your old blog! Since my old blog still existed, I just copied and pasted the text and entered the correct publishing date and those posts are online with the new blog now. A small pain, but easy enough to fix.

Now the fun part! Aesthetics!

Wordpress.org starts off your blog, even if you’ve imported it, with its own very basic theme, and you get to take it from there. There are gajillions of free themes on themes.wordpress.net, and most of them come with nice instructions about how to upload them via FTP. The Dummies book has info on this too.

I wanted SGB to look unique but I didn’t want to dive into a lot of code to do it. The Dummies book has information about CSS and whatnot, but I was still sweating peanut butter from the blog transfer so I looked for a free theme with opportunity to customize. There were so many! This theme you see here is called Mandigo, and it is by far my favorite of all the themes I looked at and/or tried before settling. You can customize easily with a theme options tool that is built right in – colors, header, columns (how many, where placed), widgets, plugins, all sorts of little stuff that you’d have to change in the code of many other themes. No need for code here – just fill in the blanks! Plus, there’s a user wiki for support and I found a few other tricks on there, like how to make my image header clickable and so on.

(And that comment glitch should be fixed, effective now. Something to do with IE and graphic file types. I dunno. But it’s awesome that I don’t HAVE to understand to fix it! The designer himself wrote to me and helped me out. There’s a lot of support even when you’re self-hosting and you feel like you’re on your own out there.)

I thought about just buying a custom header and building a color scheme around that, but I was dorking around on iStockphoto and found the little redhead up there. It’s soooo uncanny – I have chin-length red hair, green eyes, Converse shoes, and I wear white-rimmed sunglasses. All year. I have three pairs. So I bought the image rights (check out the designer’s portfolio, he has a lot of other graphics if you like that look) and set off to Adobe InDesign to see what I could come up with. Mandigo lets you put in as many headers as you want and will rotate them for you, which is why you often see different subtitles up there. I made the background image in InDesign as well – if you look, you might notice that all the writing is just portions of some of my posts.

There are so many free backgrounds out there as well, and you can have fun making a header if you’re so inclined, or there are some pretty cheap but nice ones available for customization and purchase. Jenn’s Must Love Geek just got a makeover from So Chic Design and they do reasonably priced headers and full custom or premade designs, along with many other design studios. I just got all DIY on it and had some fun, and it turned out pretty well. Even without custom images, Mandigo still offers options for several headers and backgrounds, all built in. I bet if you browse through themes.wordpress.net, you’ll see something that tickles your fancy and you’ll be inspired to try it.

I heart my new blog design. For those of you out there who are thinking about making the jump to self-hosting but are afraid of cost and effort, don’t be! I get my blog hosted for $72/year and I bought one image for $35 and one very important book for $25. That’s IT. That’s what this blog cost. It took one Saturday night and many small tweaks since then, but it’s all mine and if you’re a blogger, you understand how great it feels to produce something that’s all yours and show it off to the Interwebs. It’s the blog equivalent of sweat equity, and sometimes it makes me so happy I just sit and look at it for a bit and think “yay me!”

I do still pride myself on the content of my blog, and it’s a hundred times more important than a color scheme or a widget. If you didn’t love the heart and soul of SGB, you wouldn’t be here and my pretty page would have an audience of one. But I want my kids to go to good schools AND have nice clothes. Now my baby has a brain and a pretty outfit with purple sneakers.

Done! Woo!

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I always wished that the makers of the “–for Dummies” and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to –” would do something about those obnoxious and easily recognizable covers. Don’t they know that someone who has been blogging for three-plus years FEELS like a dummy just holding “Wordpress for Dummies” when standing in the checkline at Borders? Those yellow and black covers with their little “a reference for the rest of us!” subtitles will make you feel like a dummy just by touching them. Anyone looking at you will assume that you are not one of “the rest of us,” but that you are, in fact, so dangerously daft that you need a book colored like caution tape to warn people out of your path. Yes, it shows through the white plastic Borders bag.

That being said, “Wordpress for Dummies” helped a great deal and I do recommend it if you’re starting off on Wordpress.org and you think that a plugin is the thing at the end of the laptop-charging cord. These books should come in nice, faux-leather covers with a ribbon bookmark, like Bibles.

But welcome! Have a cookie! I’m not sure about this design yet, but I always wanted to do something with that picture of the redhead over there, and she seemed to fit with the yellows and pinks and brighten things up here. I need to sort out how to give this thing a custom header, I think. Due to a very unfortunate cash flow problem (almost-dead laptop, ornery major appliances), the professional design from Delicious Design Studio must be delayed. I like yellow, and now that I’ve figured out this FTP crap, I’m feeling invincible with my shiny NEW laptop. This will work. At the very least, I’ve passed a mostly pleasant sober Saturday night.

Baggage Update:

I don’t think that I mentioned that Kayak was an SGB reader for many months. When we first started hanging out a few weeks ago, he told me he’d stop reading if it made me uncomfortable. I told him that would be good, and he agreed to stop. Our time spent together and even just in conversation has tapered off considerably this week, which is probably just due to the fact that I am sour on everything right now and not afraid to share the fact – but a tiny part of me wonders if he read those posts about E. He’s probably just giving me space, though. Probably.

E and I spent some time on the phone on Wednesday night, and we have plans to hang out Sunday evening. I need to spend some time with the boy in a less emotionally-charged situation than we had on Monday. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him. Of course, I haven’t really tried.

Jess tagged me for this meme last week, and I’ve saved it to brighten your Monday! Or maybe I’ve just been lazy this weekend. Take your pick.

Six Random Things About Me:

1. I have serious problems with consumer product packaging. “Easy-Open” is a LIE. I can’t open the ends of soda boxes without having all 12 cans roll out of the fridge. If I do manage to get the Triscuit box open without tearing up a panel, I’ll rip the bag down the side. Cat litter, just yesterday? Everywhere. Easy-pour tab on the side of the rice box? Easy MESS. If someone will take a video of me trying to open things, I will be the next YouTube star.
2. As soon as I get home from work, I take off whatever is on my feet and put on clean socks, sometimes my old Uggs if I am cold. I hate work feet.
3. I can install light fixtures. And I live on the edge because I don’t go downstairs and shut off the fuse box to do it. I just flip the switch because I am THAT LAZY, and one day I will be zapped and crushed by a ceiling fan.
4. Since I was a little girl, I have had a daydream about a magic wallet. It was red leather. When I opened it, there would be two of each kind of bill: $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100. When I took a bill out, another of the same would appear. In my dream I would go to the cash register and count out my bills one at a time and buy anything I wanted and always have more. This is still one of my favorite daydreams.
5. My five celebrity men that my significant other HAS to let me sleep with if I get a chance are Matt Damon, John Krasinski, Jason Mraz, Adrian Grenier without the beard, and… ummm… maybe Zach Braff? (Shut up, Sean!)
6. I hardly ever eat leftovers. I pack them up in Gladware with good intentions to take them to work or eat them as a reheated dinner and save money, but I rarely do. I clean out the fridge every two weeks to see what has grown mold and I throw it away, Gladware and all.

I don’t usually get tagged for memes and I am not necessarily a fan of tagging others because I don’t know who does or does not like them. However, I highly recommend this little exercise when the post you REALLY want to write is stuck in your head and won’t come out.

Happy last few hours of Blog Day!

It’s been an interesting year in my little corner of the blogosphere. After about a year and half gathering dust, I started writing again last winter. I moved to Wordpress in March. I ditched the stapler and changed my name. I put my first name on my posts, revealed my city of residence and posted a picture of myself for the first time. I made friends and met some of them.

And I started opening up.

If you want to bleed out your eyes and read my backposts, you’ll notice that I rarely wrote back then about what hurt, about what was going on inside my head or in my shriveled, evil little heart. I didn’t write about relationships. I didn’t write much.

Now I do, and the words make me braver. Coming out of the mess leading to the E breakup, I learned that writing a post about what was happening forced me to put things in perspective and keep from blowing things out of proportion in order to tell a story in a way that will make sense to you. And if I can make my life make sense to you, I can make more sense of it to myself.

That sounds very cheesy.

Two bloggers I know disappeared in the last few months because the men they were in relationships with found their blogs and confessions. The girls deleted everything. One of them resurfaced on Blogger a little while ago. I’m nervous sometimes about the fact that I do write about my relationships, and that my writing portrays me as I am: over-emotional, snarky, and sometimes just bitchy. It’s what I think, though. It’s what I feel. It’s personal. Sometimes people tell me that they think I’m brave for sharing so much of what’s inside me with the world, and that does give me a warm fuzzy because in all honesty, it’s so hard to do sometimes. And I take a chance putting it out there, I know that… but I’ve decided that at least for awhile, it’s a chance worth taking because this is what I need to make my life make sense in my head. Not a day goes by that I don’t have some sort of tiny, niggling thought that someone who I don’t want to find this blog will find it. If Copper reads my last post – hell, if my MOTHER reads that last post, shit will go down. If Tim reads this? Yeeks. I will run away with my laptop and they’ll never find me.

But I’m taking a chance. And today I’d like to applaud a few more people who take chances.

Sean is back! “More Blitherings” is Sean’s follow-up blog to “I am an idiot. These are my blitherings.” which went away last winter. He’s just starting up again and only has a few posts, but guys – watch that space. He’s honest and thoughtful when not being a total goofball – and he’s in the Army, which, as you may know, accords him a certain amount of yumminess in my eyes.

Sandy writes “Only Slightly Neurotic” and I need to have a cupcake with her sometime. I like reading her blog because it’s about as random as mine – love and thoughts and openness in one post, and the next one is about haircuts and what shirt to wear. Loves.

Robin’s “A Little Bird Told Me” is a blog that makes me stop and think sometimes. She posts pictures and poetry and the things that inspire her to, in her own words, fill the well. And she wants to know what makes you fill yours. I usually have to pause and ponder before commenting, and I like that.

When E of “Like Spinning Plates” first commented on my blog, I freaked for about 2 seconds when I thought she was actually E, as in the E ex-boyfriend that I wrote about. After that minor heart attack, I started checking out her blog. She has recently returned to the world of employment! Heh. Welcome back to hell. I’m very much looking forward to reading how that goes.

I just started reading “The Rest is Still Unwritten” after stumbling on this fellow as he mentioned an old post of his on 20sb. I almost cried when I read it. Read it. And cry. Then read the rest and laugh.