wave goodbye to summer

New layout! For my abandoned blog! Woo! Following the general theme of the previous two layouts: one color, one pattern, one season(-ish).

This one’s good for another 21 days, until the end of summer. Then I have to come up with an autumn version. But considering it’s taken me almost two years to make these three versions, well, I wouldn’t hold my breath. :)

My Little Blogging Corner

I came across this blog entry by Elena, who found a question posted on Thistlewood Farm:

Do you ever wonder where people blog?

Do you ever wonder how they write a post? […]

Why? When? Where? How? Do you blog?

I blog right here:

Where I Blog: my desk

At a desk set in one corner of my bedroom. Yes, I know it’s very cluttered. Which probably explains a lot of my life and why my blog goes unupdated. The pile, one of a few in my room, represents projects or tasks I have yet to complete.

But I never get around to them because I spend most of my time trying to catch up with all the social media updates: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Livejournal, Youtube, and deviantArt when I can remember. (I’m a year behind on dA. *shame*) This by itself doesn’t take up much time, to be honest. But a lot of links are posted for such interesting articles or news items or random knowledge, I get stuck reading and reading and … reading …

After that on my list of priorities (which is topped by tv, sadly) is writing up my backlog of trips to Disneyland for my personal account. (The count is currently 15 trips over the past 8 or 9 months, waurrgh!)

At the end is writing at least one entry a month for my blog. I have a tiny list of ideas for blog entries. They are so unwieldy and require so much time to write, however, that I usually skip writing about them and go with the most recent idea that’s been floating around in my head for a couple weeks.

There’s no real process to writing for my blog. I just decide that Today Is the Day and I shouldn’t (or can’t!) put it off any longer, and I spend an hour or two writing. I don’t have drafts stored on my blog (mostly because WordPress’ storage of drafts as completely separate from and filling up the same database slots as published posts irks me), and I don’t write much of anything beforehand. It’s partially laziness and partially lack of time, but I think it’s mostly because when I do write out or plan out blog entries in my head, like during long commutes home from work, the thought or idea leaves my system, and I no longer feel a compulsion to post it up here.

That’s about it. Boring, I know. But I managed to fit in my “real” post for March! Yeah!

leaping over February this year

Oh gosh, I managed to do it again, not updating for over a month. At least I have a better excuse, because even though it’s a leap year, February still has fewer days than other months! February was also a busy month at work, not only were we finishing up the busy season but we had to put everything together for a big expo as well.

I also spent my extra day of the year very well, I think, at Disneyland’s One More Disney Day. Twenty-four hours straight of Disneyland! Woo! March 1st I spent in front of the tv, trying to recuperate.

Hopefully this won’t be my post of the month, because I do have ideas for blog entries, I just lack the time to formulate my thoughts and type them up here!

backup Twitter on WordPress

I spent most of today working on a Twitter backup or archive on a WordPress installation. This was something I’d been considering since I learned people were making plugins to port their tweets to their blog. Thought I’d share my experience.

What I wanted: A simple backup of all my tweets from my account and all my favorited tweets of others.

What I kept finding: Integrate Twitter into WordPress! Widget! Cross-post! Update Twitter about new blog updates!

I was dazzled by wp-lifestream and briefly considered backing up all of my social networking accounts. That was until I saw over 500 files for the plugin queued up in my FTP program. I didn’t want a plugin that required almost as many files as the WordPress install itself! (Although someone says he’s working on cleaning up the plugin, wp-lifestream2, so I don’t know how it’ll end up.)

I wanted to try out Tweet Tweet but it requires registration at Twitter and acquiring OAuth? Too much hassle just for a simple archive. But I did really like the possibility of storing Twitter replies to me, and of archiving tables. (Not that I tweet that much, although my current 1500 WordPress entries seems a bit much for me.)

After I found these instructions how to import old Twitter favorites into WordPress, I finally decided on running the Twitter Importer plugin after using the Tweet Importer to import all of my old tweets (versus only the last 20 with Twitter Importer).

Two tips I could have used, instead of having to redo my original import:

One, set the default category to the type of tweet being imported, eg “My Tweets” versus “Favorite Tweets,” if you’d like the tweets separated into different categories.

Two, turn off allowing comments! No reason to leave myself open to spammenting on old tweets!

I’d consider this a good day’s work. Even though I didn’t get paid. (Not enough work at my job at the moment. Bah.)

blossom layout

Kind of new layout. Sort of. Not really. Different graphics and color scheme. Still the same code and … layout. Placement of things, y’see.

Changed because I figured plaid and a holly sprig were not well suited to March or the following months.

I hope it’s a decent layout, because I missed Natalie Portman’s interview on the red carpet show in order to upload it! (Yeah, it’s taken me that long to update about it. Think how long it’ll take me to write entries about … whatever it was I’ve been bouncing around in my head for the past month that I can’t quite recall now. O_o)

(And woot! Natalie is now Academy Award-Winning Actor Natalie Portman, for the rest of her life, for ever and ever! XD)