Feed Me!
Times are tough right now. If you can't hire me, maybe you can buy me a sandwich instead?
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By Debra Wilson, on August 18th, 2011 I went to Dell’s website today after deciding to replace it, and looked around. I have purchased three laptops form them over the years, two for myself, and one for my boyfriend, and overall they have been very good machines and Dell has excellent customer service and warranties. I settled on a refurbished Inspiron 15R, which better stats than the machine I have now, and at about the same price as what I paid for this one. It has a 2.53 GHz processor, 500 GB hard drive, 4 GB RAM, and of course Win 7 64-bit. I should be receiving it in about 6 days.
What am I going to do with this one? I’m listing it on eBay and hoping to get at least $50 out of it. Whatever I get for it will go towards paying the new one off, which either way will be done by the end of this year. So if you want a laptop for parts (case, screen, all outer parts are in excellent condition) check my eBay auctions in about a week. Starting bid will be between $25.00 and $50.00.
By Debra Wilson, on July 30th, 2011 Tonight I spent a few hours working on redoing a good friend’s website. The previous site was done in frames, and several pages didn’t match the basic look of the site. Frames make it hard fr search engines to pick up a site, and the lack of smooth integration between different parts of the site made some areas seem a bit awkward.
Tonight I recreated her home page, then incorporated everything into the WordPress installation, editing the theme to match the homepage making the transition between pages as seamless as possible. There’s one last thing to fix on my end, then the rest is on her.
She’s thrilled to be able to edit the contents of everything except the front page herself now, and I’m thrilled to have been able to give her more control over her site and what’s in it.
The one thing left to fix has me stumped, but I posted in the forum over at Bytes For All asking for help. You have to make a donation of at least $5.00 now in order to post on the forum, but considering how much use I have gotten out of that creator’s theme, and how much help I have received in the forums, $5.00 is a very small price to pay. Hopefully we can have the last little problem fixed by tomorrow evening. 
After it’s fixed, I’ll post the link here and let you see my handiwork. Working on her site has made me want to tidy up my own a bit.
And the problem is FIXED! See the site here at http://artrez.com/.
By Debra Wilson, on March 31st, 2011 I’ve been working to help a friend solve a problem with a WordPress theme he developed to match an existing website, and while the first half of his problem was very easy to solve once I realized what was causing it, the second half is proving difficult.
In short, this is the problem.
On all page views except the main page and the single posts pages, everything displays properly. On the main page and the single post pages, the footer is not displaying correctly- it appears that the CSS is rendering incorrectly, and looks as though one of the graphics is layering over the text instead of the other way around. This is making the text in the footer on those two pages unreadable.
Because this is a WordPress theme issue, its got my stumped because the call for the footer is the same on all pages, so shouldn’t the footer be displaying the same way on all the pages? I’ve examined the php files for all pages and calls, I’ve examined the source code for the rendered pages. I cannot find anything wrong beyond a few very minor mistakes which I have since corrected.
If anyone reading this could offer some insight to this problem we would be very grateful. I believe the problem to be something simple and overlooked but I’m currently out of ideas to be honest.
By Debra Wilson, on March 28th, 2011 Whether you were ever aware of a problem or not, I had numerous issues while being hosted at GoDaddy.com. This site would be down and inaccessible almost every time I tried to access it or update it, and GoDaddy’s answer was “Well, we don’t see anything wrong with it.” After months of this, I decided t make the move to A Small Orange instead and host my sites there.
The initial move was slightly traumatic as I had a few mishaps and issues, but overall it wasn’t that bad. I closed down two hosting accounts with GoDaddy, and opened one with A Small Orange, setting up WordPress with a network option (the latest evolution of what used to be WordPress MU) and migrated my sites. In doing so, this has completely solved the issues I was previously having with the form mailer and GoDaddy’s hosting conflict.
As you can see, the Kittyloaf site is underneath the main site that houses my blog. I could have done it the other way around but this seemed most likely as my blog really is the focus of my online persona.
You can also see that in this rendition of the Kittyloaf site, I’ve gone with an extremely minimal approach to the look. I might change this later, but its not for sure. We’ll see how it grows on me or if it does at all.
I believe I have all of the pages and information sorted out here, and everything is ship-shape again. Have a look around and contact me about any services you may be interested in.
By Debra Wilson, on March 15th, 2011
As a follow-up to the Shame on You GoDaddy post, with the help of another WordPress user, a very successful work around has been found for use with the Contact FOrm 7 and a few other of the forms that GoDaddy has essentially disabled on us. Emails sent through using this fix arrive on average within 3 minutes, and the work done after the email has been received in order to send a reply is very minimal. This fix is much smoother and faster then the previous one I posted in that post.
Here’s how it works.
Set up your form as usual. Don’t do anything special to it. The special part comes in the area where you format the way the email will look when you receive it.
From: [your-name] <*[your-email]*>
Subject: [your-subject]
See the added asterisks on either side of the sender’s email address but inside the brackets? That’s it. Just add those and save it.
When you receive an email form the form, you’ll have to remove the asterisks to reply successfully, but that’s it.
Hope this helps anyone who is struggling with this issue!
By Debra Wilson, on February 21st, 2011 I have hosted my sites with GoDaddy.com for several years and have had no problems. Then, after my latest client signed up with them, I noticed a problem. A problem documented by hundreds of other people. Apparently a month ago, they made a change to their system so any form mail coming through their hosted sites will be discarded if it comes from the three following domains- gmail, yahoo, and hotmail. The three most common emails out there.
What this means is anyone who mails you using those email addresses from your website hosted at GoDaddy will have their email lost in cyberspace. Obviously if your site is used to generate business, you’re going to be losing a lot of possible customers.
I found a workaround for this for WordPress installs using Contact Form 7, but its not the best. It does however, work. What I did was when creating the form, instead of using one field to accept the email address of the sender, I used two divided by the @ symbol. In the email output part of the form, it is formatted something like this: <[text-123](at)[text-456]>. What this does is when someone sends you an email, instead of formatting the senders email address as name@domain.com, it formats it as name(at)domain.com. You’ll have to manually change the (at) to a @ to actually reply, but it gets the emails to come through.
I can’t seem to do anything about the lag time though, which is tremendous. I found mention of another fix that is swaps the sends email address with yours so they all appear to come from you, which also works, but the lag time was several hours longer then when using my fix.
At this point I am tempted to move my sites to another host (I’ve heard good things about 1&1.com lately and they are very cheap) but GoDaddy doesn’t give refunds and I actually just paid for another year- I can’t afford to let that go. I may move the Kittyloaf site though when it runs out. It depends how things go with the current website project and how much it ends up bringing me in when we get finished. I haven’t really decided one way or the other.
By Debra Wilson, on January 18th, 2011 
Just added this to my Etsy.com shop. Its made up of beautiful Swarovski cystals and pearls connected to the bracelet chain by jump rings, anchored on paddle pins. Price is $15.00 plus shipping.
By Debra Wilson, on January 12th, 2011 I received an email tonight from a local woman who needs a logo and site set up for her dog rescue. I love working on animal themed stuff, and this is going to prove no exception. I’ve started work on her logo and so far I’m liking it. I’ll be sure to post the link to her site once everything is up and running. I can’t wait to get this finished and up and running.
By Debra Wilson, on January 4th, 2011 I got my order of 195 bicones today from Amazon.com. There are 13 colors, I think 15 of each color. A really pretty mix. There are two shades of pink, a purple, a red, two blues, a green, a turquoise, orange, clear, jet, a pinkish amber color, and something slightly yellow- its not quite cantelope. I’ll look up the color names later today to see what they are for sure.
Looking forward to getting my order form Fire Mountain tomorrow so I can get started on some stuff using these. I never did post what I ordered from FMG, did I? The stones I got were on sale for about a dollar a strand, so got a good deal there. I went with silver plated instead of actual SS for the res because quite simply, SS is expensive stuff.
 What am I going to make first? I am going to do a bracelet or maybe a necklace using the chain and the stones and headpins to create a chunky piece. Planning on using the three colors of stones I have pictures above and maybe some other stuff I have on hand now. Then I am going to do another one using the Swarovski crystals providing I can do a good job on it.
By Debra Wilson, on January 3rd, 2011 I am finishing up the flat spiral stitch bracelet that was supposed to go with my necklace and earrings back in October. I should be finished with it before I go to bed tonight, and will be posting pictures of it soon. Of course right now I am wishing I had ordered enough of the Swarovski crystals to do a double-row of the stitch, so I may wait on adding a clasp and order more crystals to do so later. I know it will be gorgeous either way but it will really have some extra oomph if I do decide to double it up.
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