A few weeks back, I saw a posting on the MomPack looking for a web designer who would barter design services.  It’s been so long since I’ve taken on any web design clients and even longer since I’ve donated or did design work pro-bono.  The first websites I ever designed were back in 1996 (yes that means I’m old).  lol!  My first design clients came in 2000.  And some of those I took on as pro-bono sites to help me build a portfolio.  One of those sites (which is no longer up and running) was done for an older woman who created handmade floral craft items.  I took her site on for free so I could learn more about shopping carts.  In the end, I had created a very large ordering site for her that brought her a nice chunk of regular orders and income to supplement her retirement.  It was a website that she could never have afforded.  It was a great feeling.

I’m not sure what spurred me to e-mail this particular lady back.  I have no idea how I even caught the e-mail because I haven’t been actively reading the MomPack list in a long time.  But I did.  So I checked out her current site and saw that it had enough content in place that it would work as a wordpress site.  Having just redid my blog, I thought it would be nice to delve a little more into wordpress.  So I e-mailed the lady.

The non-profit is an Indiana organization run by Christine Martin.  She started it last year in hopes of helping local single parent families and families who have experienced a loss of a child.  It hit a little too close to home.  Having just helped Jeanine get through a nasty divorce and seeing firsthand the changes single parenting has brought to her life, I thought karma seemed to be staring me in the face.  I was going to help this lady if she’d let me.

So after a few e-mails back and forth with her, I started working on the website over the past few weekends.  Unfortunately, I did not take a before shot of her old website. I usually do when I work a redesign but I completely forgot and the DNS switched.  Bravenet – her old hosting – does not allow website viewing of accounts that aren’t pointing to them so there was no way to go back and view the old site using Bravenet’s server domain.  I tried.  So, I have no before shot unfortunately.

The before site was mainly white with text.  It had a menu at the top that linked to all the individual text pages.  It was designed using Bravenet’s website creator and was very basic.

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For the past week, I’ve been working on swapping my front room with my back room.  I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile – over a year – but I kept running into resistance from other family members (..ahem… DH).  But after some more arm twisting, we agreed to swap the rooms.  Before the move, my front room – the room people walked into when they came in the front door – housed my computer, the Wii and Dan’s toys.  It was usually a big mess.  It was not an easy room to walk into every day nor was it a room conducive to having people sit down when they came over.  Typically people would stand around at the front door and stare at my big mess.  lol!   I was just tired of it.

I took before photos – but I took them on my regular camera and for some reason my laptop isn’t reading my SD card this morning.  The drive isn’t even coming up.  The SD card is working because my camera recognizes it and usually my laptop recognizes it fine.  Not going to be good if my SD reader is bad on my laptop.  So I have no before photos to show you… only photos of my work in progress…the photos below were taken on my iPhone as I went along and are quite blurry.  I have an older blog post (opens in new window) that has two photos of what my office and front door could get like although they weren’t this bad when I started my move…it’s always nice to have a point of reference. lol!

DAY 1 – Tuesday – The plan

The first thing I did was put together a planning sheet of where everything was going to go. I’m usually pretty good at visualizing things like this in my head… but I will still plan out diagrams on paper and work things out from there.  I try to make my diagrams as close to scale as I can but they aren’t perfect.

This was my original new front room layout.  It stayed exactly how I planned it out.

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Just wanted to post a solution I found to the highly annoying problem of GMail crashing Firefox when you close a GMail tab or move away from GMail.

If you google for this error, you’ll see most sites agree, including the Mozilla team, that the GMail Talk Plugin is causing this error. The solution is to disable Google Talk.  Just look under your Add-ons and uninstall GoogleTalk.

The only problem is I don’t have Google Talk installed.  So now what?

To find out that GoogleTalk is definitely the cause, you’ll first need to check the firefox crash report to make sure it is reporting GoogleTalk or UserCallWinProcCheckWOW. You need to report the error using the Mozilla Crash Reporter (the box that pops up on a crash that asks if you want to report the error).  Report it and then look at the crash log.  If you don’t report the error, it will not appear in your crash log.

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Yesterday after fighting with Thunderbird yet again, I decided to take the plunge and switch my email over to GMail.   Jeanine has been using GMail exclusively for over two years (I think it’s been that long now) ever since her last Outlook crash.   I wasn’t ready for GMail then and GMail wasn’t ready for me.  It’s come a long way in the past two years.

I don’t know if I like the idea of storing my personal emails on an online/public server.  But I do like the idea of being able to access them wherever without having to know all my individual email passwords off the top of my head.  I have always kept a folder of passwords to my various hosting accounts and clients hosting accounts in Thunderbird.  I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to move those emails over to GMail or not.  I’m probably just being paranoid as everything is out there these days – much more bothersome than some hosting passwords.

I spent a good chunk of time researching yesterday how to move my existing email over.  I periodically remove old e-mails (like once a year) where I go through a serious purge.  But on a daily basis, I’m not so good at regularly deleting crap I don’t need.  With GMail, I already see that changing – select ALL – DELETE – is a very nice option.  LOL!

After going back and forth with a few “programs” that would import e-mail into GMail, I decided to opt for using Thunderbird to do the import.  I setup an IMAP account for my GMail account in Thunderbird.  I could see all the GMail “labels” and I was able to create new ones on the fly right from Thunderbird.  Then it was a matter of drop/dragging the  folders and e-mails right into the GMail labels.  The process went rather smoothly.   I created filters on the GMail side as I went along and this morning have been creating some new ones on the fly as I receive e-mails.  The process has been remarkably painless for me.

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Yesterday, I received this direct tweet from @webmastergeek after following him.  I don’t think he intended his auto tweet to look this way but it was definitely good for a laugh.   LOL!

I have had Vonage phone service since January 2006.  I believe at that time, Vonage had been around for a year or so.  I remember at the time, I was completely fed up with Comcast (and prior to that AT&T) and their billing.  Very overpriced.  So I took the plunge and switched.  I have never looked back.

On Friday, I had to call Vonage and cancel my business line and fax line.  I figured they’d some how screw it up and cancel my main line.  I also wasn’t looking forward to speaking to someone who had difficulty speaking and understanding English.  I had been dreading this call for a few weeks now.  They bill all customers on the 4th of the month, so I knew Sunday was my billing day.  So I called.

My plan was to make two phone calls.  One to cancel the business phone line and one to cancel my fax line which was attached to my home plan.  I wasn’t trusting that the person would not get “confused” during the call and screw it up.  I’m so trusting of customer service people. NOT.

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We’ve got some new products up at KV this week.   All of these products are selling for only $1.00 each! Check them out!

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