It has been a long road…
This entry was posted on March 9, 2008
… getting from there to here. At least, that’s what the song says. In some ways, I agree. This time last year my site was only a few weeks old. I was blogging when I didn’t fully understand what ‘blogging’ meant. I’ve always been anal about my markup - that is something that hasn’t changed in all the time I’ve had my own website.
I was looking back at my site on my old host (which is still up if you’d like to have a look) and it’s strange to compare it to my site now. I can’t stand the layout, and I don’t like a lot of the way the site is presented. At the time, I thought my site was great. Now, though, I realise that it was far from it.
So what have I achieved in the last year-and-a-few-weeks? Well, I’ve made lots of e-friends (Aisling, Vera, Amelie, Ben, to name a few); I’ve even met one of them (Lilil). I’ve moved from a free host to a giant hosting company and I’ve even taken on a second domain to play with.
I’ve successfully installed a CMS and that’s going spiffingly. I don’t think I could go back to managing my pages manually, even if I do still love FanUpdate. I’ve gotten closer to my dream of being an employed front-end web developer, and I’ve even inspired people to start blogging.
I’ve always tried to be nice and helpful to people, and I think it has paid off. My traffic has steadily grown (not that traffic is an issue, but it’s always nice to know that about one hundred people a day visit my site), but more importantly the number of comments I receive on each entry has grown as well. At first I thought having a high number of comments was a good thing, and I still think that. I appreciate every single comment I receive, and even if I don’t return every comment, I always check out the person’s website. It’s really satisfying to see repeat commenters on my site - it’s always nice to know I’m doing something right.
What have I done to mark this momentous occasion? Well, I’ve uploaded some of my numerous photographs into a gallery, I’ve set up a page to show you how you can be part of the Calm Banana family, and I’m working on a couple of other little projects as well. Also, this is my 100th post!
27 lovely people have commented
And the winner is…
This entry was posted on March 7, 2008
I really didn’t plan on dedicating three entire entries to my favicon, but I received a lot more feedback than I was expecting, and I just want to thank everyone for that.
And so, let’s get onto the results.
In fourth place is favicon #3, with one vote (MC).
Third place goes to #4, with two votes (Mike and Tracy).
Second place goes to #1, with three votes (Bobbi-lee, Robmarie, and… me).
And in first place is favicon #2, with a total of 27 votes (Hanna, Louise, Amanda, Jem, Vera, Julie, Aisling, Rob, Hannah, Kip, Thomas, Melissa, CPS, Annie, Emsz, Regine, Kristina, Clem, Chantelle, Tiffany, Louise, Kaylee, Lene, Renee, Kaisa, Christine, and Chien Yee)!
There were of course several undecided / vague responses, and I haven’t counted these. However, they wouldn’t affect the final result anyway, since #2 had such an overwhelming majority of the votes.
Jo - “I like #3 but I think #2 is going to win.”
Amber - “#4 is my favourite but #2 is more appropriate for you.”
Kim - “#2 or #4, but probably #2″
Holly - “Definitely #2 or #4″
Miki - “#2 or #4, definitely.”
Abby - “I like #3 and #4″
Thank you to everyone who voted, and a special thank you to the three runners up: Tiffany, Annie, and Christine.
And of course, thank you to Lilil. May your ego continue to inflate, and may you enjoy seeing your favicon all over the place.
(The favicon is showing up for everyone now, right?)
15 lovely people have commented
Mm… juicy!
This entry was posted on February 17, 2008
I love to drink orange juice! I sometimes feel that I’m single-handedly keeping the orange juice industry in business, such is the volume that I drink. If there’s no orange to drink, I just have plain water. I don’t like hot drinks, I don’t like fizzy drinks, and I don’t like other kinds of fruity drinks. It’s either got to be orange, the occasional apple and blackcurrent, or nothing.
To pay my respects to this wonderful juice, I have a new layout! It’s clean, it’s un-cluttered, and it’s yummy.
The colours are from a colour pallette called “That’s the gay one” and I made the background stripes on stripegenerator.com. So far the theme has been tested on FF2, IE7, Flock, and Safari for windows. I haven’t been able to test it in IE6 yet, but I don’t envisage any major problems there.
Please, have a poke around, and let me know about any problems you find. If anything unexpected happens, I need to know. I get uppity when my themes aren’t perfect, and I can’t fix a problem I don’t know about.
Over the next few days I’m planning a slight restructuring of the site. I’ll be adding some content, and removing some content. If anything unexpected happens, this will be why.
Right. That’s enough hard work for one day. I’m off to have some orange juice.
