Out of Avalon

January 16th, 2009 by Ascelyn

I haven’t written anything in a week or so.  I’ve tried–or at least, I’ve tried to try–but it just isn’t working for me right now.  I have several things I need to write, if only to get them out of my brain in hopes that they’ll then cease tormenting me, but they’re harder to write than I thought they would be.

Once upon a time, I considered writing my art.  I was acknowledged as being fairly good at it, winning competitions and holding the respect of those around me, peers and otherwise.  I’ve given it up, or maybe it’s given me up.  Either way, this is no longer art.  It’s unpolished and harsh, life poured out onto paper like blood.  And like having some poisoned portion of your anatomy removed, the process itself can hurt.  Finally it’s all over, and the healing can begin.

As I confided a week ago, I get a kick out of checking the visitor stats for my domain.  A dozen fancy bar graphs concur that more and more people are coming here, and more and more are doing so repeatedly.  I’m not sure who you all are, but hi.  In some ways, I hope I can give you what you want, but in the end I can’t help but continue in my selfish ways.  I write for me, but you’re welcome to take a peep.

Because I don’t know who you are, though, I start to worry more about what I’m telling you.  I need to write, and I need to take the risk of being read.  I need the feeling that someone’s hearing me.  At the same time, I need privacy in some ways.  If not for me, then for others.  Plus, there are some people I just don’t want to read some things, but I have no real way of keeping them and only them out without more information than I have.

It’s hard to balance, and I’ve not really had to worry about it before.  I think it would be easily accomplished with Livejournal, but then I’d never get to write at all.  Finally, I’ve found a plug-in for WordPress that will allow me to make chosen posts available only to registered users or subscribers.

I’m still working on finding a way to moderate subscriptions, but if you’re someone I would probably talk to anyway, feel free to subscribe (in general, if you’re on my friends list on LJ, or if you’re from Offsprung, or in general if I know you and actually like you, BUT you’re not my little brother or Sheep Man or a random person from the online casinos that love to link to me).  If I get this set up right, I’m going to take all my currently password-protected posts and hide them behind the filter.  People who aren’t logged in won’t even know these and any future posts exist.  It should be more streamlined than my previous method, which sucks, and I won’t have to worry about who’s acquiring a password unbeknowst to me.

In the meantime, I’ve had to upgrade WordPress to make the plug-in work.  Then I got to play with the script, which I amazingly figured out in only two tries.  Doing so also deleted all my category names.  I’ve figured out how to fix it, but that, in turn, requires me learning how to open .gz files.  I’m getting there.  In the meantime, I’m categoriless.

I also want to get up a list of links, and a picture, and maybe someday even a real web page.  We’ll see.

January 6th, 2009 by Ascelyn

I do have other things to write about, but they’re depressing, and who really wants to listen to me whine anymore?  I know I sure don’t.

Occasionally, I’ve been known to amuse myself by looking at the visitor stats for my domain.  Mostly I just like to see where people are coming in from.  Search engines?  Links?  As with cleaning out my Askimet backlog, I get to laugh at the things people think my readers (okay, that would be me) would like to buy.  Apparently, they’re depressed, anovulatory men over the age of 65.  The vast majority of my visits stemming from links are from gambling and, to a lesser extent, credit counseling sites.  The only legit ones I’ve seen are mostly Livejournal, Offsprung, and Alianor de Ravenglas’s blog over at Wordpress, with a smattering of links from people’s Hotmail and Yahoo inboxes (you’re emailing about me?  weird…).  On an exceptionally bored day, I might even try to hammer down those IP addresses that account for the bulk of my traffic.

While links are fun, search engines are even better.  Below you’ll find a list of the search terms used to enter my site in ‘08, sorted by frequency and then alphabetically.  Yes, I put far more work into compiling this list than I should really ever admit to.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 18th, 2008 by Ascelyn

All right, so I’ve been playing with Plogger for the last day now.  It’s not too bad so far, and certainly neater than the ones I hand made for my early high school albums.  There are, however, a few downfalls.

I’ll start with the photo-y goodness.  For starters, I can actually upload and display my pictures at long, long last.  Since I finally figured out the whole rerouting URLs thing yesterday mere moments before getting my Plogger issues resolved, that wasn’t as critical as it might have been.  Combined, though, it means that I can both show pictures right here within my entries and have a coherent, stand-alone photo album.  I wanted both, and now I have them.

Once I figured out how to access the _install.php file on the server, installation was pretty easy.  Getting it actually running was another matter–I could log in successfully, but I couldn’t upload pictures or click any of the tabs.  After reading about some similar issues on Plogger’s discussion forum, I figured out the first half of the problems (replacing a single line of code in two particular files depending on my host server’s settings).  The second half baffled me entirely, but the good folks Dot5 had me up and running a few hours later.  I won’t even attempt to explain what the problem was here (something about php ini acronym acronym?), but the guy both fixed it for me and explained how to do it in the future if something were to go awry.

Let me explain something right here.  Long, long ago, I was pretty good at this whole web page thing.  I had a pretty successful banner-supported site on Dreamwater (because Geocities and Tripod were for losers), and I even made multi-page sites for several local businesses.  I refused to use anything other than Notepad, and I had physical notebooks filled with pages of HTML I’d drafted while bored during lectures.  I helped get two friends who are now professional web developers started.

Of course, this was back in the 90s, and I’d never heard of PHP or CSS or anything, really, other than HTML with a few javascript shinies thrown in.  When I tried to get a page going again a few years ago, I realized how long ago the computing world must have left me in the dust.  I never see pages in plain ol’ HTML any more.  Even my knowledge of that is obsolete.  Yes, poor widdle me.

So having an album that’s pretty much plug & play is good for me.  Free plug & play is even better.  The problem comes when there’s a problem with (as in my case) PHP sessions, and I’m clueless.  I still don’t really understand what that means, much less how to fix it.  I blindly make changes as instructed, save the original “just in case,” and hope for the best.  Luckily, my background knowledge of HTML, however obsolete it might be, lets me understand a little what I’m looking at even if I don’t really know what’s going on.

So that’s Bad Thing #1 of Plogger:  it doesn’t really come with instructions.  Being open-source (yay!), you can make changes as you wish.  You’d just better know what you’re doing when you need to make those changes.

Bad Thing #2 is my only real complaint.  I want to be able to password-protect certain categories, certain albums, or even the whole system.  Specifically, I’d like to protect the Honduras albums, since I don’t have explicit permission to be putting people’s pictures up on the web, nor do I have the means to contact several of them.  The SCA albums are less probematic; I can get permission from most.

There are instructions on the forum for protecting a single album, which would be fine for now, but I don’t really understand them well enough to follow.  I can’t even figure out which file I’m supposed to edit in step 1, for crying out loud.  For the sake of those of us without the appropriate skills, it would be great to have a password protection option on the admin page.  I heard it was supposed to be incorporated in the next upgrade, but since 3.0 is out now, I’m not sure when that will be.

Bad Thing #3 isn’t really bad, but it would be great if it were different.  I’d like more themes/skins.  Wordpress has tons, but I’m not finding as many for Plogger as I originally thought there’d be.  Not really a problem, exactly, but I’m sort of let down about it.  Of course, I don’t have much of a right to complain if I don’t do anything to fix it, and I don’t have the skills to make my own themes.

That’s it on Plogger.  I’ll post a link to mine, if you can’t find it on your own, once I get everything straightened out and appropriately protected.

December 17th, 2008 by Ascelyn

I DID IT!!

I edited a PHP file!  All by myself!  AND IT WORKED!

And THEN, after I did that, I finally figured out what URL some other piece of crazy PHP or something redirects to my pictures!

Oh squee!  Oh my!  And ALL BY MYSELF, too!

 

 

…This moment of extraneous capitalization and exclamation brought to you by ME, because I DID IT!  Yay me!

 

Update:  And NOW, I’m finally managing to install Plogger.  I figured out the trick.  Hooray for me! (11:34 a.m.)

June 5th, 2008 by Ascelyn

To start, my brilliant idea.  Not too brilliant–that would contradict my very nature–but good enough to make me awfully proud of myself.  I just came up with a new design for the front page, you see.  It’s going to be stellar.  It will solve every problem I’ve thought of so far with the current “freebie” template.

Now I just need someone to draw it for me.  I’m unreasonably proud of the little sketch I just did, but that’s mostly because you can actually tell what it’s supposed to be.  With most of my drawings, you can’t do that.  I won’t tell you what it is just yet, but trust me when I say that it’s awesome.  Also, it involves the tree and the three stars from my arms, which is pretty spiff in and of itself.

Now, onto my “List of Stuff I Want”:

• Not-so-noddy ($18)
• Bone needles ($5 each), needle case ($20), and thread winders ($2.50 each)
• Comb ($25), boxwood with my tree engraved
• Wire weaving drawplate ($35)
• Glastonbury chair
• Wool cloak, heather gray
• Hoods, one each in blue-green linen and felted wool
• “Work” cotehardie, brown with no tippets and an inch or so off the floor
• Fitted cote, wine red
• Stockings and garters
• Pattens
• Thin leather belt
• Chests for clothes and necessities
• Cooler chest
• Smaller veil pins
• Matching set of one-of-a-kind 14th-century feast gear (mug, bowl, and plate)
• A set of period utensils (spoon, knife, and fork)
• Cooking gear, serving/washing bowl, and pitcher
• Lantern or candleholder
• Salt cellar, various small containers for sugar and spices
• Tablecloth and napkins
• Wash basin with mirror and towel
• Area rug for inside the tent
• Woodblock print of St. Catherine

Had enough yet?  Yes, some of those are seriously far off, but it’s nice to have them recorded.    I bolded the ones I want to get first, whether I need to make them quite soon or plan to buy them at (wait for it…) PENNSIC.  A few, like some of the feast gear, clothing articles, and wooden wares I’m hoping beyond hope that I can somehow barter for.  Heaven knows I have little enough to barter besides child-herding–I don’t have any real skills yet within the SCA, and I certainly don’t have the brute strength for helping with heavy work–but it’s worth a try!

February 18th, 2008 by Ascelyn

After many months of on-and-of searching for a usable template, I finally found one I love. See the main page for an idea of how it will look. The template was for a wine company, but once I have pictures to put up it will be a piece of cake to insert them in the proper places. I’m not sure what I’ll use to replace the bottle of wine clipart, but it will be easy to just match the background to the yellow-ish color currently there.

Then I just need toys to sell.

Aaron’s birthday is in early April, so I want to make him one of the bag kits I’ve been thinking about doing. It will be a nice little bag with several toys inside. For him, I’m thinking about a leather ball, a Viking horse, a stuffed animal or Pict (it’s an action figure, not a doll–really!), and a little hobby horse. Or maybe, if I’m being extra cool, I’ll scale down one of those collapsible chairs that all the cool grown-up have so he can sit in that at events instead of his little camp chair. Or maybe, I’ll make a linen cover for his little tent so we don’t even have to throw a blanket over it in the hall!

Right. In any case, I plan to photograph anything I make him and use it as web site fodder. I’m also hoping to talk his parents, Violante and Miguel, and Cathy into letting me use their kids as models in exchange for lots of cute pictures.

Regarding the bags, I want to make lots of bags with “Ascelyn’s Treasures” or whatever I come up with embroidered on the lower right-hand corner and whatever symbol I use painted or appliqued on the front. Inside will be four or so toys. I want to have two or maybe three different sets for different ages, and the contents can vary slightly (doll vs. stuffed animal, hobby horse vs. Spike, etc.). I’d love to be able to find or convince someone to make some child-sized feast gear, as well. It’s documented and totally period!

As for the site, I’m not sure yet what I’ll do with pages beyond the front.  I have several ideas, all of which I could easily do; I’m just not sure yet which will win out in the end.  I feel pretty lame using a template of someone else’s creation, but apparently my once l33t web coding skills are now completely archaic.  Granted, the last time I built a new site for someone as opposed to just making regular updates was when my mother started doing legal nurse consulting.  That was back around 2000.

On the other hand, I’ve finally given up on Gallery for various reasons.  Not sure if it’s the program’s fault or the fact that my hosting provider is being screwy, as always.  Either way, starting the next time I have unfiltered net access to get on vDeck, I’ll be installing Plogger.  My Honduras pictures are uploading via FTP as we speak (using the form for Gallery was taking forever), and the rest will follow when I’m on my personal laptop.

I’m also thinking about making a subdomain for the kids at church.  It will have reviews of what we’ve been covering in class, games, and a password-protected photo gallery.  I’ll give the password to the kids and their parents, but the photos won’t be available to every creep on theweb.

Think that’s it for the moment.  More later.

September 6th, 2007 by Ascelyn

Well, I’m now running of off Firefox, at least part-time. I like it–I’ve always liked it–but the same things that irritate me about the new versions of IE have always driven me crazy about Firefox. Namely, I don’t like the way the toolbars are displayed up top. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, though, and it’s still a million and a half times better than IE’s new setup.

The best news of all is that the site runs just fine so far in Firefox. Granted, there’s not much to the site yet, and Wordpress seems to have been designed by alternative browser lovers, but it’s still good to know it all works out. Now I just need to get the rest of the site up and running. I have plenty ideas, and if I had the graphics I want I could organize them just bloody fine in HTML, but CSS is still beyond me. Maybe getting over my annoyance and actually trying to learn the new stuff would help.

I’m hoping to meet my original set-up-shop date and sell at Holiday Faire in November. The problem is, I also intend to watch Aaron. Maybe if I can “borrow” a wee little tiny bit of a corner of Eadric’s….but no, that’s just kind of rude to ask. I might ask it anyway at some point, but I do feel pretty bad about it. I probably still won’t have much by then, though. Balls, dolls, stick ponies and other animals, games, and Viking horses, at least.

I made three felt balls last night One is dark blue, lighter blue, and yellow/orange, another is silver and dark blue, and the last is bright green and orange, with a tiny bit of leftover blue. At least they’re something I can do while sitting on the floor watching Invader Zim.

Once I have a few days on my hands, I want to do at least a half dozen dolls assembly-line style. Cut all the pieces, sew them, stuff them all, do all the hair, sew all the faces, make all the chemises and undershirts, and then finally get around to designing the clothes. As I find designs that work, I’ll trace them and make a basic pattern so I don’t have to custom fit each outfit. I wasted a ton of time and muslin working out patterns on Their Majesties’ dolls, and don’t want to have to do that ever time.

As for the wooden toys, my scroll saw should be in today. Hooray!

Now I just need to find a good source of leather….

August 31st, 2007 by Ascelyn

When I was hunting for skins, I wasn’t finding too many that would fit the job for this particular journal, blog, site, or whatever you want to call it.  There are plenty of girly-girl skins, plenty of businessy skins, plenty of angsty-teen skins.  I needed one, however, that would fit my personality, be professional enough to link off of Ascelyn’s Treasures, and well, not be scary.  A few years ago, I would’ve probably chosen something black with lots of red and dragons or skulls.  I’ve calmed down a bit since then, and apparently people in this little hick town were horribly offended by my being so “goth.”  I wasn’t goth.  I never have been, and I never will be.  If you’re too shallow to look beyond the fact that I liked–and still do like–the color black, then you should really be spending your time cultivating some thought processes not based off stereotypes rather than pestering me.

But since I live in Cumberland again now, and since my inlaws and the church don’t like it and prefer to talk behind my back and make trouble rather than asking me questions about it, I’ve mellowed out a bit.  Whether that mellowing is spirit-deep or simply a pretty little facade to keep people off my back is another matter, but apparently the soul of a person is less important than the fact they they prefer black and dark blues and reds and greens to pink and purple fluffiness.

I really miss Pittsburgh and CMU sometimes.

That’s completely tangential, though.  The point is, I needed a theme that would make me happy and keep the world happy at the same time.  I tried paradise-10, which I still can’t get to run properly, and moved on to OldForest.  I like how it looks.  The more I play with it, though, the more things I find that I want to change, if only I could figure out how stupid style sheets work.

For example, I would like to have a calendar or a list of recent posts or something on the sidebar.  I’d also seriously like links at the bottom of the main page as well as the individual post pages that lead to the previous and next posts.  There are other little things, but those are the two main ones.  It looks great.  Now I just need to get it to function the way I want it to.  I even have the commands I need to make it do these great and wonderful things, but can’t just look at the style.css file and tell where I’m supposed to put them.  Really, I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to put them in that file or somewhere else.  It’s absurd.

Anybody want to teach me to use CSS?

August 30th, 2007 by Ascelyn

Well, I’ve accomplished relatively little today. Benjie and Seth are on a business trip, so I can’t get the last bits of information I need from them to finish the 4-axis mill presentation. My allergies are driving me crazy again, and I’m out of tissues. I feel like I’m sitting in a fog. My brain just won’t work like it should.

Oh, and Jason? I told you not to seek this out. Meanie.

There is good news and bad news regarding the web page. The good is that I’ve got most of it up and going so that I don’t need to use the browser-based vDeck, which my firewall here blocks. I can do everything through FTP and my journal itself once I’m logged in. I can’t yet work on the photo gallery, since I think I’ll need to get back into vDeck to set my username and password for it.

The bad news is that my knowledge of building web pages, while very good five years ago, is now hopelessly outdated. While putting up a simple holder page on ascelyn.com earlier, I learned that the FONT tag is now antiquated. How can you say not to use FONT?!? So now it’s all to be done in CSS? I don’t know a thing about CSS! I was coding professional-looking (for the time) web pages for local business before I hit high school, and now I can’t even do a space holder page properly. Grrr.

The other bad news is that this journal has constant trouble loading, presumably server-side. The main page and the (currently empty) gallery load quickly and completely, and at times so does the blog. Half the time, though, it either times out or I get error notices from WordPress. Well, since it works sometimes (though slowly), I don’t think it’s my parameters, which rules out two of the three possible issues. I sent a help request to my host last night and answered their request for more information this morning, but have yet to hear back with a solution. I like the way I’m getting things set up, and the hosting/domain package here is really good, but I don’t like that this portion of the site is down so much. Hopefully things will get straightened out shortly.

I have a few options for my web design. The best would be for me to update what I already know and do it all myself. This could take quite some time, with how super-incredibly outdated I am. I have no doubt that I could do it, but it takes time, and there are currently other things I’d rather be doing—fixing up the house and making my toys among them. Option #2 is to let Jason help me. He’s already offered. I’d almost rather him never seen my site, though, simply because I think I’d feel silly. Option #3 is to have someone else do it, but that costs money. Just like I have better things to do with my time, I also have better things to do with my money. Oh, and Option #4—find a free template and change things around as I see fit. This would be fine if I could find an appropriate template, but I doubt that’s going to happen.

So in the end, I’m still lost. Maybe I’ll have J help me when I find time. After Coronation. Probably after Siege of Glengary. Sometime in between him working on the basement and me working on the spare room. While working on forming a new canton. Right….

August 17th, 2007 by Ascelyn

Well, I’ve gone and done it.  I have my own domain once more, but the New and Improved version.  No longer am I jannan.net; I am now ascelyn.com.

If nothing else, I’ll get the chance to write it down for people who can’t spell it.  I like how it’s spelled!

Why Ascelyn and not Jannan?  Well, if you’re reading this, you ought to know anyway.  Jannan was one of the principle planets in my trilogy, and where Kariss originally ended up in Present Tense.  If you’ve known me long enough, you probably know that I ended up with the nickname “Kariss” for quite some time because of those books. 

That was long ago, though, and now I’ve collected many more exciting names, most of which were chosen completely without my consent.  A good example is Juanita.  Not just Juanita, but Juaaaaanita.  Did I ever want to be called that?  No.  Or Mouse, which wasn’t anywhere near as bad, but still given to me rather than chosen.

Ascelyn (pronounced ASH-linn or ASH-ell-In), on the other hand, I chose myself.  I’m a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, or SCA, which attempts to recreate the middle ages “the way they should have been.”  To help with this, we choose personas for use during events, people who might have existed in the time between 600 and 1600 AD.  My persona is Ascelyn Mallory, a fourteenth-century Irish girl fostered under her great-uncle in Kent, England.  The surname Mallory gives tribute to my father’s mother’s family, some of whom lived in Kent at the time, and the given name Ascelyn…well, it’s pretty enough, don’t you think?

But back to web pages.

Jannan.net never took off, mostly because a friend of mine kindly registered it for me as a surprise during a period when I didn’t have time to do any developing.  I’d had a few relatively popular sites before that, but they were hosted on third-party sites, like Dreamwater—though I never stooped to consorting with Geocities or Tripod, which I despise.  I have great (or at least mediocre) hopes for the new site, though, especially once I get my toy merchanting up and running.  If nothing else, at least I’ll be able to post to my journal from work, which has blocked all of the usual blog sites since my last entry (Blogger, etc.).

So that’s my story, at least for now.  Read more later if you wish, but I make no false promises that it will be pretty.