The Cerebral Mum

I’ve done a fair bit of work on the site design and only have a few things left to tweak. I found a theme I absolutely adore but the layout is fairly image based so I had to do a lot of editing in Fireworks to change the colours.

But, boy, do I love the colours now! So here is a sneak preview…

(Note: I’ve compressed the image so it looks a little blurry here, but at least I’ve saved you some time on page load.)

The base theme had no header image so it took some work to build that in, although the hardest part was finding the right image to begin with and then blending it so that it would work full width while the content itself was fixed width.

I also incorporated a more website-style menu, rather than the usual blog-like list of pages beecause the blog isn’t the most important feature of the site: Making sure people have access to all the information they need to help us out is. I couldn’t take a screen shot with the hover effect - because I had to use my mouse to get the screen shot, but on hover the menu item changes to a lilac background, also with the little arrow indent.

Like I said, the CSS is a little image based but I haven’t created something like this before so I’m quite pleased. The 3 pictures there will change. I’ve just used stock images while working on the layout. Unfortunately my mother’s external hard drive got stolen so I don’t have access to all her photographs from Afghanistan.

It was a horrible loss for her after a decade of working overseas and travelling to exotic places and meeting so many wonderful people. Unfortunately her laptop only has thumbnails so everything is gone. It’s a good reminder to backup, I guess. But what an awful reminder!

I also switched the theme to left sidebar instead of right, again, so it appears more as a website than a blog, and I removed the top navigation bar all together.

I’ll probably write more about it the base theme later - and bore you all to tears - but I just wanted to show you a little bit of what I’ve been doing while abandoning this blog to hurried, un-proofread posts.

And when I finally have some free time?  Boy, is this blog’s design in for a major overhaul!

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I didn’t write a Christmas post, or a New Year post so this will be my Year-That-Was post.

Guera, one of my new favourite people, who writes one of my new favourite blogs, A Roaming Aussie Mum, has challenged me to the Favourite Five Meme.

I say challenged because I’m pretty sure that I will find this hard. You see, the meme is this…

Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts, one relating to each of these key words:

1. Family
2. Friend
3. Yourself
4. Your love
5. Anything you like

The only thing I ever write about is No. 3. Yes, I am that self absorbed. But I shall give it a shot. You just hold the line while I go hunting.

I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.

(Some time later…)

1. Family

Not just sibling rivalry… is probably the post in which I’ve talked the most about my relationship with my sister, whose house I currently live in. Although I mention her often, I don’t really discuss the details of our relationship, or its ups and down. I don’t discuss those kinds of details for any of my real life relationships, because words are permanent and I hope that I am wise enough to use only the ones I can stand by, and that I have enough integrity to not lash out in an arena where there other has no means to defend themselves. Our relationship isn’t easy, and I talk about that a little in this post, but the overwhelming emphasis is on what is strong and good. As depressed as I may be, as difficult as life sometimes is, I do try to always focus on that.

2. Friend

There wasn’t an obvious choice for this one. There is a post that written for a specific friend in a specific circumstance, Because you remember what I remember…, but my care for her was written obliquely within my thoughts on the nature of friendship. I know it reached her, however and that she understood all that I was trying to say so it is an important post to me. And then there is the The first birthday party…, with a long list of appreciation for many friends who too often get lost in the darkness of my mind. As awful as it is to feel alone and abandoned, it seems somehow worse to fail to recognise those people who do not abandon you and who light your way. This is the post I wrote for them.

3. Myself

Oh, a wealth of choices! I think that makes this an even harder choice. I have a favourite but I have linked to it in several other posts so I’m going to choose the most special one, one I didn’t write myself: The Cerebral Mum, from another perspective. I was so grateful to HG for doing this for me, to help me see myself from someone else’s point of view. It is such a wonderful post in it’s own right, but it also made me feel fortunate to have people like HG in my life, and that perhaps I wasn’t so lost as I imagined.

4. My Love

Love takes many forms, I know, but many of them have been covered by the other key words. The obvious choice is Caspar, but I do not think that I have ever captured in a single post the breadth of my love for him. And I cannot help but read this as meaning an adult love, they kind you have for your partner. I don’t have one, I have written nothing about one., so I’m sitting this one out. At some stage, I will probably write about this kind of love, theoretically, and the way it befuddles me. But that post doesn’t exist yet. The bonus post under “Friend” will have to suffice.

5. Anything I Like

My failed attempt to complete 30 Poems in 30 Days yielded one poem that I love, Sapphics of the deep, so that is my choice. It is imperfect. It was written in a difficult metre that I was unfamiliar with, but to me the words are rich; dense with symbolism and mouth-filling. Those not familiar with the Sapphic may not recognise the rigid form in which it was constructed but for an undisciplined person like myself, restricting my writing in this way and still being able to create something large remains a source of pride.

And now the tagging. I generally don’t tag people for memes. Instead I ask anyone who would like to participate to let me know so that I can add their link. But often no one ever does so today I’ll break that habit and and invite…

1. Karen from Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum
2. Mountainmama from Careful What You Wish For…
3. Anonymum from The Nook of Oz
4. Missy from Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
5. Stewart from The New USSR, Illustrated
6. Marj aka Thriver from Survivors Can Thrive

There are of course other people I’d like to tag but I’m only supposed to do 5 and January is half gone so many people have already written their retrospectives. If you want to be added, however, let me know because I was never that good at following senseless rules.

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Dear Blog,

I know that I said I wouldn’t write until after New Year but the days seem to be getting longer. I don’t think I realised how much I would miss you, even though it was I who went away.

A lot has been happening, and I’ve been keeping myself busy. I’ve found other rewarding ways to occupy my time. There have been some awful days and some wonderful days and some dreary, nothing days in between. It’s not that I feel the need to tell you all about them: I have never been a good diarist and my thoughts have always taken priority over the events of my life. But I miss the anchor you provide, that space at the end of the day when my time is yours alone.

On the days when I feel like I have achieved nothing, when I have no motivation at all, I force myself to take care of you and it overrides the purposelessness of all those hours which came before. On the days when I am overflowing with ideas, or words, or pains, or joys, you give me a place to pour them out yet hold them safe.

Often my life lacks a sense of reality. I am not a grounded person. It seems odd that you, living such an abstract existence, are the thing which keeps me earthed. I thought you would be the place where I would take off on those flights of fancy I miss so much. I was wrong about that.

I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.

I’ve worried about the shape you take, I’ve worried about the face you present to the world. I’ve worried about your lack of coherence. Sometimes, I haven’t even liked you.

It turns out that you are not a mirror held up to show me who I am. Just like a person, you are a hall of mirrors. I cannot make you whole and make you Truth. I cannot choose which reflection I will look at: I may see from the corner of my eye something that holds meaning, or something unrecognisable.  I cannot choose what others will see reflected. Some aspect of light may catch them, or they may move on.

So you will be what you are. Just pieces. I cannot write myself like a book. I cannot read myself like a book. I think I asked too much of you and I wore us down. I am an exhausting person. But that’s okay too.  I do not need to worry about how our story ends.

You are a very special medium, and new to me, but you have taught me something. You cannot analyse an unfinished text, like a blog.

Or like a life.

And I miss you, so I’m coming home.

Yours (truly!),

cerebralmum

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I’m back from a few days away, with so much to write about, but I really just need to get everything under control again. There are only 60 unread emails and 261 posts in my feedreader, and I think I’ve managed to reply to all the comments here already, but still feels a little out of control.

I need to clear myself some headspace. I need to clean up.

Obviously there isn’t going to be a Sandbox Sunday post this week because for the first time in a long time I didn’t spend Saturday night at home on my computer. I had hoped to write a [Fiction] Friday piece while I was away but didn’t have internet access in time. (Something to do with my cousin having a few too many knockoffs after work to remember to bring the laptop home with him.) That’s okay though, because Friday’s theme was Skeletons In the Closet and I couldn’t come up with any ideas that didn’t seem trite or tired.

In other news, you might vaguely recall me mentioning a while ago that I’d had a “stellar idea” for a new blog, a resource rather than a personal journal? Well, I’ve been working on it a little and today I came home to an email proving that I must be the luckiest depressed person on the planet.

Thanks to All For Women and their 12 Days of Christmas promotion, I have just won a new domain name, a year’s worth of hosting and assistance with the initial set-up of the blog. (That’s on top of winning that $250 recently from the Imaginif team!)

All for Women put together a wonderful collection of giveaways and they still have one prize left to give: $100 cold, hard cash. Entry is open until the 20th so stop by for a visit. Aside from my prize, my personal favourite was the Bright Star Kids Wall Graphics (which was won by KateF over at Picklebums), a wonderful and surprisingly affordable product which I will definitely be investing in once I get somewhere of my own to live.

If my good fortune has inspired you to leave a comment or three in hopes of some Christmas gifts, Imaginif is giving out another cash prize this month: Christmas Competition: Child Safety Tips. Or if you’d rather win an iPod, toddle over to Outfit Inspirations and take part in The Great Online Christmas Scavenger Hunt.

I’ve already solved the puzzle, of course. I’m annoying that way. (I still remember with sadness the day my mother said that she wouldn’t by me any more for Christmas because I solved them too quickly. Didn’t she realise that was part of the pleasure?) But I’m not going to tell you the secret. Because it’s about the journey, you know. It’s possible, however, that one of the links in this post contains a clue.

But back to my prize… I’m still not going to mention what the new site will be about, but I’ve got a busy year ahead of me and I’m hoping that it will be very successful. I’m even hoping that it will bring in a couple of dollars to pay for hosting once my year has run out.

And while I’m handing out the linky love (and, believe me, it’s genuine linky love) , I know as I set to work I’ll be spending quite a bit of time reading Andrew Boyd. He’s writing two interesting series at the moment: Get A Real Blog, for those thinking of moving to selfhosting, and the Flagship Blog Project, which is all about setting up new, quality blogs. It’s one blog a month for those involved in the project, a task I wouldn’t even consdider tackling, but so far the content has been really valuable and I hope the process laid out can help me achieve my goals.

But that’s enough for now. I need to do some serious cleaning to get my cyberlife back to almost manageable proportions. And then tomorrow I will begin to tell you about my long weekend.

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Saturdays are now going to be my day off. Not a blog free day, but a writing free day. I’ll working in my sandbox (my place to experiment with the design of this site) and Sunday will be my day to blither on about what I achieved. It may be boring, but even I need a break from my intensity - I’m intense even when I’m not depressed! - so it’s weekends of fiddling, putting things in order, figuring out how to make them work, and getting away from everything clogging up my headspace.

The main job I was working on last night was converting this to a 3-column theme, but this theme isn’t set out in the most convenient way for doing that without screwing up all the styles so I didn’t get very far. It’s all a learning curve, though, so if I have to rewrite every template file, all the better.

The one thing I did achieve is now visible on your tab (if you use Firefox) and in your address bar. Notice that red squiggly thing? That’s my favicon, a tiny little sign of the shape of things to come and a kind-of-logo for The Cerebral Mum. But what is it?

It’s a neuron.

I took the original image (seen left) from Wikimedia Commons then I made sure the background was transparent, recoloured it, shrank it down and did a little work to make sure that it would display cleanly at that size before running it through Dynamic Drive’s FavIcon Generator. I actually tried a different generator as well, but this one gave me the best result. I also now have a slightly larger icon to use on my desktop.

My theme actually came with a favicon but it has never displayed so I had to fix it. And this is how I did:

10 Steps to Installing a Favicon in WordPress

Step 1

Delete the old favicon from the active theme’s file, if it has one. (I use Ftp.) If you have one, it should be in the theme’s main folder, not a sub-folder, and it will be called favicon.ico.

Step 2

Upload the new favicon.ico file you have generated (using the generator linked to above) into your current theme’s main folder.

Step 3

If you use WP-Cache, clear it. Also clear your browser’s cache. I use Firefox extension Cache Status so that I can do this from my statusbar whenever I need to. If you don’t have it, go to Tools : Options : Advanced and select the Network tab then push the button that says Clear Now. (I am being specific about this because, being the nuf-nuf I am, it took me a little while to realise why my changes weren’t displaying.)

Step 4

Open your blog’s homepage. If your favicon is now showing up, Yay! If not, you need to edit one little file. Be brave.

Step 5

In your WordPress Admin panel go to Presentation : Theme Editor. Select the file called Header from the list of your theme’s files on the right. Your screen will now show the title Editing header.php. If you don’t know PHP (and I don’t) this will look a bit daunting. Just make sure that you have a back up of that file. (I usually just click in the editing window and select all then paste it into a text file so I can revert without having to upload again.)

Step 6

Look for a line of code that begins <link rel="shortcut icon" and ends with /favicon.ico" />. If you have one, overwrite it, within those boundaries with the following code.

If you don’t have one, simply paste the following code beneath the tag <head>.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/favicon.ico" />

Save your changes.

Step 7

Clear Wp-Cache and your browser’s cache again, as per Step 3.

Step 8

Open your homepage. The favicon should now be displaying.

Step 9

In order to display the favicon in your subscribers’ feedreaders, upload another copy of your new to the main directory of your site (ie; http://yoursite.com/favicon.ico) because depending on the reader they use, it may not be picked up in your header.

Step 10

Go and have a glass of cognac. You now have a mini-logo!

Happy To Help

If none of this makes sense but you’d really like to have one, just ask me your questions in the comments form and I’ll see what I can do.

Also, I used FireWorks to do the editing so if you regulars don’t have the tools but have an idea of what you want, I’m more than happy to edit then generate the favicon file for you.

So…

My first Sandbox Sunday. I hope it was useful for someone.

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Just some adminstrivia…

Blogroll Now Imported

I have finally imported the blogroll from my old domain so the Read page is useful again. There are a couple of changes to the categories so unless the blog has a specific focus, everyone is listed as a Cerebral Type but I’ve divided them into boys and girls so they don’t get too bulky.

I’ve put a poll up on the page so I can make it as functional as possible. Help me out by answering my question.

I’ve also added a few new blogs today. They are…

• Airminded
• Enola
• Fantasy or Ria Ludy?
• Futility Closet
• Pomgirl
• Puntabulous
• Reader Appreciation Project
• Sephy’s Platzish
• The People Behind My Eyes
• The Rejector
• Web Designer Wall
• Write Stuff

Ranking & Social Networking

Not that any of it matters, but I just like to figure out how things work and things like SEO and social bookmarking aren’t (weren’t?) things I understood very well. I had all but given up on them, finding them spammy and ineffective as I’ve already said. Then somebody Stumbled me and suddenly I had visitors in the 300s instead of the 30s. It’s dropped back down again now, but it I discovered that I actually like Stumbling and have added the toolbar to Firefox.

I will be making sure I’ve Stumbled and Technorati fave’d all my favourite blogs over the next few days.

I also now have an Alexa Rank for the first time. It’s 888,749 and my site is reaching 0.00045% of the global web-surfing community. Very impressive! My Alexa Rank for Australia is 5,703, which I think is pretty cool and Technorati is slowly shrinking back to what it was before the move.

Thank You

I have two things to thank Megan at Imaginif for. The first is because she was the person who stumbled me and made my stats leap like a gazelle. The second is not only for her, but for all of the Imaginif team, because they gave away a prize of $250 recently and I was the winner! And Megan was so happy for me that I just want to hug her.

(Incidentally, the prize was drawn from a pool of people who participated in their Safety Talk Forum and they are running another competition this month.)

Also, thank you to Snoskred who has invited me to Get Out Of My Niche. I’ll be writing my very first guest post this week.

Apologies

There are a couple of things that I still haven’t got around to fixing since the move, primarily the display of tags and related posts etc, so I’m offering a quick apology because the navigation here isn’t quite what it used to be and things are a little messy. I could list dozens of things that need tweaking but it’s probable that no-one cares about it as much as me, so I’ll leave it at that.

I’m also struggling to stay on top of comments at the moment so I apologise if I haven’t responded to anyone who has left me a message, and also to those who have blogs that I usually comment on more. I’ll sort it out.

I feel like I’ve missed a million things I meant to mention, but this will do for now.

Don’t forget to go and vote on my poll!

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I said recently that moving to the new domain and losing all my rankings was a bit hard. As much as I write for me, a blog without readers makes no sense. I do want to be read. I have never known how to write anything without trying to create for an audience. Don’t get me wrong: I never write to an audience. But what is worth saying is worth saying aloud. And what is worth creating is worth sharing.

I love my little community here. I love the people I have met and I love their blogs. And I want more. I also love learning. I like picking things apart and figuring out how they work. Blogging has provided me with a lot to figure out.

One of those things is social networking. Even that phrase is daunting to me. I have never been a networker. I have never gone out of my way to build connections. I am not even particularly skilled at maintaining the ones I have. The beauty of the blogosphere is how many ways you can build your social network, though, and this post is one of them.

Recently, I had a few new visitors to my blog. I like to try and return the favour. Tonight, stopping by to see Sueblimely Blogging Sueblimely, I read her post about rssHugger. This is one of the reasons I love blogging. The blogosphere is a generous community, so generous that it seems like serendipity.

I have been struggling to find the right ways to publicise my site. There are so many options but nearly all of them have appeared to be spammy and shallow. That isn’t a good way to build community. It’s a time sink. But just when I thought that Technorati was all there was for me, Sueblimely appears with rssHugger.

Now, I’m am not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to social networking, but even with a quick skim through of Sueblimely’s post I could see that this was something that would suit me. The aims of the site are simple.

• To bring bloggers and readers together.
• To provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader.
• To help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in.

By registering there, I will be getting a page which profiles my blog and syndicates my feed. That’s something of real value to me. And it costs $20. Except right now. Right now you can register for free, providing you write a review of the service on your blog. Obviously, that is what I’m doing right now.

The service is new and, as Sueblimely said, that makes it difficult to get a full idea of how it will work and the direction its development will take. From my initial impressions though, it looks like it could be good. There are already some very credible blogs listed and there are definite benefits to getting involved at the birth of a new project.

The fact that Collin LaHay, whose brainchild this is, opened up the the site for free registration because of a vote within the community is a good sign that he will be responsive to the needs of those he provides a service to. I like that.

So, it’s a good time to sign up if you want to. I know a couple of you readers are as, hmm, let’s say… as naive about social networking as I am so perhaps it is worth checking out. It can’t hurt. And it might just turn out to be a wonderful thing.

Besides, you will find me there.

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