Liza Olmsted

A long time ago, I started creating my own site in php.  I used to have some facility in php and enough of a grasp of css that I thought I could develop a whole site.  It would have a blog with site-specific news (that’s what this wordpress was for), and it would show my most recent posts on livejournal, and it would have pages about me-as-a-writer, maybe some of my stories would go up.  The other key thing was that it would have some of my non-writerly things on it, which would have their own color scheme and a different title.

I did amazingly well at creating a logo/title I liked and at setting it up to have a welcome/why-you-should-be-here bit at the top, and even succeeded at getting two columns to have site news and lj-blog news.

But the layout… not so much.

And then I wondered… why am I spending so much time on this, when wordpress is designed for this stuff?  Other people do *amazing* things with wordpress.  Am I too good for that?  Too lazy to figure it out?

Finally, I’ve thrown in the towel.  I’m accepting wordpress as my personal website-savior.  I’ll probably write some posts on LJ, some here which cross-post to LJ, and some here that don’t.  (LJ people don’t care when I update this site.  Then again, you might not either.)  So, I’ve added all sorts of nifty plugins which should make this look the way I want.  (Notice the nifty Haiku Corner plugin, which randomly displays an unformatted Haiku!  I could not, for the life of me, get it to preserve line-breaks.  I don’t know why either.)  It should accomplish all of the things I intended with my liza-developed site… only be easier to maintain, with all sorts of nifty features that I don’t have to develop.

Any day now, the index.php at www.intelligentlizard.com will go away, and for some time you will be redirected here, to www.lizaolmsted.com.  (Until I manage to move the contents of wp. to www., without losing anything important.  Wish me luck!)

I am excited by this change.  I’ve wanted to have a nice site for myself for a long time, so I could direct people to it without being ashamed.  Soon, it will be possible.

Yep, I have changed nothing here.

But I’ve changed things in the rest of my life. I’m living in a new home, and I’m going to have a new office. And I’m learning to balance my working life with my writing life… and so I hope this will give me more opportunities to improve this site, especially to make it look nice, or at least usable, and to add content.

Meanwhile, there are other things for me to be doing, and I don’t believe anyone is actually visiting this site anyway.

If you do visit, drop me a note, either here: www.lizaolmsted.com, or here: lizawrites.livejournal.com.

Alright, I’ve been working all night, and it’s 4am now. And I’m reasonably certain the layout now looks worse than when I started.

But it now updates when I add a newsy post to my wordpress, and it updates when I post on my blog. I’m quite proud of myself for that. And if I were to add a new welcome-y post, it would replace the current Welcome! description. All very fab.

So if I could figure out how to keep all of my columns balanced, *and* have everything have height at the same time, then I’d be set. I know I’m doing something wrong, because my container divs aren’t as long as the contained divs. I imagine that once I figure that out, then I’ll get to attack the next problem. ;)

Meanwhile, I watched Pitch Black and V for Vendetta tonight. I’ve never seen either one before. I’m not *entirely* certain that I’ve seen them now, but at least I heard them. :)

Well, I’m updating the site a bit. I changed the theme. I’ve made it so my front page (www.intelligentlizard.com) automatically forwards to my blog (www.lizaolmsted.com), because there’s nothing *on* the front page right now, and I’ve been too lazy to put anything there. :-/ Until I do, it’ll stay this way.

I do have other plans for the site. Once I have some sort of a layout for my main site, I’ll make my wordpress match it. The problem is that I don’t have any sort of layout in mind for my main site. So here we are.

Well, this is my first post. I’ve got my site back up, in the sense that it exists, and is now hosted by dreamhost, but it doesn’t actually have anything at the main index page anymore. Bah. Once I take the time to rescue files from the busted hard drive, I might just have a site again. Or not.