Well, I screwed up my site big-time. I was trying to make WP-Validator work, but I have close to 10,000 entries for it to analyze (that’s posts + comments) and so it needs altered max_execution_time and memory_limit variables. While I was playing around with different ways to resolve this, I managed to delete my custom php.cgi file. Oops. Most of my website is built on PHP - photo galleries, weblog, personal FTP, everything.

So I tried reinstalling custom PHP, but it broke. I filed a support request, choosing the OMG EXTREME CRITICAL EMERGENCY!! EVERYTHING’S BROKEN! People are DYING! option for the first time ever. I realized that the error I had gotten when it died was that the process was killed, and DreamHost occasionally kills processes for no apparent reason, so I figured I’d try again. This time it broke in a different way at the same point, but apparently it was enough for my journal.amanita.net domain to start working again. I’m glad I moved it from /amanita.net/journal to /journal.amanita.net because I think that’s what helped fix it.

Unfortunately my personal FTP and photo galleries are still down; I assume anything that’s actually on amanita.net itself is dead. I am assuming my journal has fallen back on the default PHP installation used by DreamHost; at this point I am more than happy to have it all go back to the default!

*blink*
Oh. I just removed from my amanita.net .htaccess file the part that told it to look for my custom install. Now everything is using the default DreamHost installation of PHP, and my personal FTP and photo gallery seem to be fine. I’m going to leave my support request in place because I would like to know what happened when I tried to install my custom PHP (the part that broke), but it’s not nearly as critical now. There’s no way to change the priority on the ticket, but if any DreamHost people are reading this, well…get back to me when you can, okay?

This will probably not be of interest to anyone who isn’t into PHP, WordPress, and/or Sidebar Widgets.

I am having bizarre results trying to widgetize my design. The biggest concern I have is that I need the widget title to be outside the $before_widget code. I figured out how to do this by altering widgets.php and rearranging the order to be $before_title, $title, $after_title, $before_widget - but this is not an ideal solution, for a few reasons. First of all, it means I’m messing with stuff that wasn’t designed to be messed with by the likes of me! It means I’m slightly changing the code of the widget authors, and I don’t want to to do that. I would be just fine with only using text-input widgets that run PHP, because then I could just copy the code directly from the existing sidebar rather than fussing with various types of widgets.

I want to widgetize my design (which is originally an open-source design by Christopher Ditto, but I have modified it a lot, so I’m calling it my design) for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t like having the second sidebar’s code buried in the footer. Second, there are great big chunks of tables and whatnot that come before and after each section, to make the pretty little boxes with the funky corners, and I’d like to not have to look at that every time I want to edit my code. I suppose I could do it by using includes…I’ll have to give that a try, it will at least get things more tidy if I can’t actually use the widget functions.

I got the sidebars installed and working - I figured out how to have two of them, etc. - but in addition to not placing the title where I want it, the boxes are just coming out wrong. I don’t know if this is a result of the default code on each widget, or what - but I’m getting repeated top corners, lines extending too far, and other weird stuff that shouldn’t be happening, since I’ve pulled the before/after code straight from the existing sidebar, which works fine.

And this is totally weird. While I was messing around with widgets.php, a little “www” appeared in the upper left corner of both my design and the WordPress admin screens. I have no idea where it came from or why it was there. When I went back to a clean, unedited copy of widgets.php, it went away. I was also experiencing failures in functions.php whenever the Sidebar Widgets plugin was deactivated - I had to rename functions.php to something else just so I could use the admin side. Additionally, there were gaps between the section titles and the boxes - I don’t know where those came from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was related to whatever was making the boxes come out funny.

I seem to remember seeing someone who offered to widgetize any theme, for a fee. Part of me wants to do it myself, but part of me is so clueless about how to fix these errors that I’m considering passing it off to someone. I can’t figure out what site offered it, though, so for now I’m stuck doing it myself.

I have been getting a lot of hits lately from searches for “coupons” and the like, so here’s a post all about online coupons.

First, when you’re hunting for deals, be prepared to only see coupons for specific products. There are always lots of Amazon coupons floating around, but they are usually for a specific vendor or store department. There are also sometimes coupons for offers you would normally get even without a coupon - free shipping on purchases over $75, for example.

But occasionally, you can find good deals with online coupons. For example, I just checked on the 1-800-FLOWERS coupons (I usually send flowers from them, on the rare occasions I send flowers), and they have one for 20% off your entire order if you order by December 31st! This might be perfect for sending hostess gifts, decorating your own home, or just brightening up a loved one’s day this holiday season.

For some reason my design is behaving strangely. In Firefox, some of the bubble titles are sitting right on the line as they’re supposed to, but others are a few pixels above the line. In IE6, all of the titles are sitting on all of the lines, but there are no descenders; I guess IE doesn’t respect z-index because adding that didn’t help. I don’t understand why some of them are behaving differently - they’re all displayed using <h2>.

And this is not actually related, but I also want to widgetize my sidebars. This is likely going to mean substantial modification to the original design, because the right-hand sidebar is not actually a sidebar - it’s embedded in the footer code. It should be a fun project to widgetize this design.

Oh, and my site title is the wrong color in IE, I will have to figure that one out.

• Nurse Ratched’s Struggle for Power
  A Feminist Approach To Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  (tags: women)
• Historic Fort Belvoir
  History of the Belvoir Peninsula from prehistoric times to the present day, including the establishment of Camp A.A. Humphreys and, later, Fort Belvoir.
  (tags: dcarea history)

Our plans for Las Vegas are firming up, and getting better! We now have our flight information - we are flying nonstop from Dulles on United. We leave at 8:20am on Feb 14th, getting in at 10:35am, and we fly home at 1:00pm on Feb 24th, arriving at 8:40pm. My fare was $438 plus a $15 service charge for booking it through A’s employer’s travel agent. It’s expensive, and I don’t think we are in adjacent seats, but we can probably switch once we’re on board and at least we’ll get to travel together!

Our hotel details have changed. Previously we were staying at the America’s Best Value Inn at the south end of the strip. But now, we are staying at the Venetian. This is significant because it is way over the $114 per diem allotted by A’s work, but she got a waiver and so we’re staying there for the first seven nights! This is where the conference is being held, which is far more convenient, and it’s quite fancy - I think all the rooms are suites. We’ll be paying for the last few nights ourselves, so we’ll probably be moving to somewhere more affordable like the Sahara. (I’m hoping that the Las Vegas Hilton will extend their Nemesis package into February; if they do, we’ll do that.)

We already have our Zumanity tickets, and I am hoping to book Penn & Teller tickets too. I’m so excited, my head is going to explode with pink candies flying everywhere!

I remember getting birthday favors at parties when I was a kid, but I had no idea wedding favors existed! I don’t think I’ve seen anything besides the little bottles of bubble solution…not that I’ve been invited to tons of weddings, but still, I think that’s all I’ve seen. And of course I don’t remember a single birthday party favor that I either gave or received!

It turns out there are some really unique wedding favors out there. A lot of them are items for use in the kitchen or around the home, and some of them are just decorative. I especially like the heart-shaped measuring spoons because they are so cute! I think I’ve seen a very similar product in catalogs but I’ve never seen them for only $3.15! (That’s the price for just one - if you order more, as you would for a wedding reception, you pay less per unit.) I also like the design of the heart-topped bottle stopper but I’m not sure I’d want to receive it as a wedding guest…because I’m not sure what I’d do with it, except maybe regifting it with a bottle of wine. They also have really cute bride and groom cookies, and I’m impressed that you have to order each one separately, which means you can order two brides or two grooms if you want to. And aren’t these the cutest little candle holders you’ve ever seen?!

It’s funny, but I have mixed feelings about weddings. Part of me doesn’t like going, because I feel like it’s being shoved in my face that I can’t get married. Part of me does like going, because it’s nice to be liked enough to get invited, and it’s nice to see your friends who are in love, and so forth. I would definitely have a fancy wedding with a pretty gown and everything if I could! We probably won’t ever have that, though we might have a catered party for our 10th anniversary in 2008 - we’ll see. Or maybe we’ll just run off to Paris for our 10th anniversary!

• Lower Broadway Home To Unconventional Tattoo Parlor
  It’s perhaps the only place in the world where you can purchase a tattoo and a Bible. “I know that it is a different ministry, that it is hard for some people to accept,” Henry said. [via needled]
  (tags: body.art religion)
• Top 10 Pink for October redesigns
  Special blog designs celebrating National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
  (tags: blogging design health women)
• LightPress
  A frontend for WordPress. It says it “sits between the DB and your blog’s readers” and apparently it’s just a highly optimized, template-based version of the admin side. Not sure what you’d need it for, but a plugin it is.
  (tags: wordpress php)
• XTube
  Gay and straight porn videos. Might be free?
  (tags: sex)

I was going to put this in tomorrow’s quicklinks, but I decided it was worth its own post, especially because you have to do this in order. These are all YouTube videos.

First, check out Patrick Stewart Alphabet, which I found thanks to hobbitblue.

Next, go to The Picard Song. You might want to turn your speakers down, this is kind of loud.

And finally, The Sims Picard Song. Also loud, but funny!

(Unfortunately none of these are accessible to deaf viewers…I really hate that. Sorry!)

I love taking pictures. I’m not into digital photography…I only like to take pictures of my cats. I have 450 pictures of my cats on YouTube, and as my cats age, I need to take lots more pictures of them. I keep my little camera on my nightstand so I can grab it the moment one of them does something cute. I used my 1MP camera to take almost 200 pictures and almost 10 videos of Toadstool before she died, but they are just not as satisfying as real pictures that I can print out and put in a frame next to the urn. It’s too late for me to have great shots of Toadie and Empress Wu, but if I had a 6MP HP camera I could really get fancy with my other four cats!

For other people, the preferred photographic subject is their kids. I don’t have any kids, so I take pictures of my cats. Over and over and over…deleting the blurry ones as soon as I take them and putting all of the rest on the web. Have I mentioned I love my cats? Have I mentioned how fabulous it would be to have ginormous 6MP pictures of my cats? Have I mentioned that HP, which sponsored this post, is a very reliable company that has been around since 1939? Have I mentioned that I don’t even know what pretexting is, and that HP’s corporate operations have very little to do with whether they make good products?

I am clearly deserving of a 6MP HP camera, because to a crazy cat lady like me there is nothing more important in life than pictures of your babies. Meow! (This post was sponsored by HP.)