Friday

Sunshine did not come home until one am last night (okay, okay, this morning), and I got a little ahead of schedule because of it. Then I fucked around like as asshole all day today. That may not be entirely true, but it really doesn't seem false, either. The vast and interesting (and head-pounding) changes I made to this blog—-actually that one—-at the beginning of all of this have given way to little, time-consuming tweaks to make sure everything works right, everything is colored right, nothing is wrapping to a second line, and that all of the links go where I want them to. Between each little tweak I make, I have to save and reload and back everything up. I have learned the hard way that one false move means hours of reconstruction, so these things have to be done one at a time. There are, like, two thousand moving parts on this thing, an I have this terrible feeling I am missing something that is going to make me look like (more of) a dumbass (than going on and on about it does). We were supposed to go out tonight, but instead we stuck around the house because Sunshine only got four hours of sleep last night and because when I blink I see "bracket return h two pound sidebar class colon return margin colon ten px comma auto comma zero zero semi-colon return padding colon auto comma auto semi-colon..." and on and on. Right now it is raining like damn mad and I am going to unplug this because the lightening is right over us. It's okay, I can actually make changes in my head now. [Cavin]

Thursday

Thursday the thirteenth. Eerie. Last night I ended up staying up reading odd websites and crafting the links bar at the bottom of my main blog page. Also, I stuck in a little, I don't know what the geek term is--widget maybe?--that tells the current time and temp and sky forecast out at the Monterrey airport (which is in Apodaca). Now you know exactly what type of weather they are enduring thirty minutes to my north. This thing is coming along pretty swell, and I think that I am on track for my wishy-washy go-live date at the end of this coming weekend. Mostly, I don’t have to learn much else to finish, I just have to apply what I already know, like, everywhere across the whole damn thing to make it look pretty. Oh wait, I just realized that while I have been troubleshooting the hell out of my main site, this one here has gotten no attention at all. I'll have to add that to the bottom of the to-do list (right under "kill yourself if you ever say 'go-live date' again"): "make update stuff nicer" because right now it looks like poop. Update from later: Sunshine left to go to the Miss Nuevo Leon pageant a little while ago, and I will be in here working on all of this stuff for a while. I suspect I have the rest of the night to myself. This is the problem with becoming obsessed: suddenly I have plenty of new space to fill, and nothing to really write about. I should have gone out tonight, but I have important formatting to do. [Cavin]

Wednesday

After yesterday's post here there was very little time to do a lot more. Yesterday was a cooking day, and I woke up late after staying up so late working with this on Monday. I did manage to update all of the profile information, and diddle with the look of all of this stuff a little more. Wrote new paragraphs to sprinkle here and there. Also I started laying in my new links section using a blogrolling service that makes it easy (now that I know how to fill all of the extra space). Anyway, looking around for everyone I know with a site to link to (previously there were only three friends on this site, and if I was going to blogroll I needed a lot more), well, ended up with me spending a lot of last night reading cool stuff online. That is what I am doing so far today, too. Rosy is here cleaning today, and now she is kicking me out of the room so she can vacuum. When I return I will spend the next billion hours doing Photoshop trying to make some sort of icon for this new rebuild. Oh, PS, I am so into detailing out the battles won on this one subject that I am completely forgetting to actually post interesting content. No one knows to look at this yet, but here goes: went to dinner with Olga tonight at an Argentine place called Neuken. The tango show was a little inexpert, but I really enjoyed it. The band was especially fabulous. It takes four to make two sets of tango-ers, but I had no idea that they had to exchange dresses between the dances. [Cavin]

Tuesday

Sunday I finally managed to make the item pages of my post show up in a different template. I know I am a rank amateur, but I feel pretty good about myself. The trouble I faced, once my new sidebar worked and this update stuff was happening, was that the new format caused the necessary shrinkage of the main content column in the middle. What this means, dear reader, is that the long articles that prompted me to make this whimsy space here, some of them in excess of two thousand words, were scrolling a mile down the damn screen. Not only was this difficult to read, but frankly it looked silly once it outdistanced the sidebar content and continued on down as a little motorcycle skid of lonely text. So I employed the usual trick and inserted code to hide these articles behind cuts, so that only some of each thing appeared on the main page. I suspect that this is all very elementary, but it also gave me the idea that if I could make more text appear on the post page than did on the main page, that I could probably also change the entire parameters of the page view as well, displaying the content bar in the middle at a comfortable reading width again. Well, it took all day, but I managed it. Also, this gave me a whole fourth sidebar to decorate. By last night I was taking pictures of the lamps around the house. [Cavin]

Monday

Greetings. This it the revised original first post of this update content blog, designed as feed material for my, um, "real" blog, previously.... On Friday, I decided to embark in a grand overhaul of my journal and haven't really seen daylight since. The goal was to make a separate update area within my other page for more typical log-type content. Friday I managed to screw around with my template till I got a third column, and yesterday, against all odds, I managed to make this stuff halfway appear in it (after several frustrations with insert tags (wrong kind of server capability) and object tags (just butt ugly, and also a reduced functionality in Internet Explorer). So okay, fearing the worst, which in this case would mean hand applying update content into the damn template code every time, I kept looking and found my answer in RSS feeds: I am converting the .xml to java script (actually a handy other place has done this for me) and so I can at least supply some 255 characters per post here to display there. Cool. Now I got to figure out how to keep it from looking like a sprinkle of shredded newspaper, huh? [Cavin]