To hell with all of that for now. If I keep thinking about all that stuff, I will never blog again! The irony is that I have had far more to blog about in the last year than I ever had before. Mostly fairly mundane stuff to do with the longest apartment renovation in history, but outsiders may well have found parts of the saga quite amusing. Plus, it may have been better all round if I had ranted here occasionally instead of constantly moaning about it all to my poor family! On the other hand, I may well have been sued after telling tales about the countless tradesmen and home furnishing outfits that shafted me, so maybe my blogging break was for the best.

But all’s well that ends well. I finally moved into my apartment in mid June, and apart from the occasional mishap such as a leaky water pump flooding brand new carpet, everything has gone swimmingly. I have already been freelancing as a web developer for a year now too. I never saw myself running my own business, but touch wood, it is going really well and it’s easily the best job I have ever had. I work from home along with my boyfriend, coding websites. So, I have been setting up home and a business simultaneously, and we are still having fun balancing the two!

These major changes are why I’ve given my blog a new name, “Homespun”. I only picked the name “wysiwyg” initially because I thought my blog was going to be technical, but it descended into personal waffle rather quickly! My life is now completely different from when I used to blog before. I’ve gone from living at home trekking in on the 39 bus to work in the city every day, to working for myself from my own home. While my blog will still be pretty light and personal, I’m now writing from a different viewpoint.

I was going to just start a completely new (anonymous!) blog instead, but I’d probably never get around to actually doing that. I’m not sure how long I will be back blogging, or how often I’ll post. I was never very good at blogging regularly, even when I had far less to do! I have not even had time in the last year to read other blogs. I’d like to start doing that again too. If I read other ones, I might remember how to write one. Here’s hoping some of my old favourites are still on the go. I’m sure there are some new kids on the blogosphere well worth checking out as well.

It’s good to be back, even if I lost this post when I finally clicked save and had to start all over again! Damn Gmail for getting me so used to automatic saving. Poor WordPress – after a year hibernating, it probably did not know what had hit it.

Having finally got the keys to my first home – an overpriced but homely apartment in need of a lot of TLC – I am now immersed in a whole new world of electrics, plumbing, furniture and wallpaper stripping. And not just any old wallpaper. Thick dark brown hessian cloth wallpaper. I only included a thumbnail sized swatch of it on this web page to spare you the trauma of experiencing it in all its glory! While it is taking forever to remove it all, it is a great comfort to remember that when it was put up over 20 years ago it was very expensive and of great quality. Still, when the walls are finally all freshly painted in about 2009, I am sure we will look back and laugh! I think I will leave property developing to Sarah Beeny in future but hopefully our own project will be complete by the summer in time to have a chicken nugget barbecue to celebrate.

Not content with buying my first property just as the market looks like it is finally starting to stagnate (or sink according to some), I decided to further unsettle my world by becoming a freelance web developer. I’m an all or nothing girl! My boyfriend is also freelance now so at least we will sink or swim together! It’s early days yet but thankfully it’s going really well at the moment. It’s a bit hectic but that’s a good complaint.

So, unfortunately blogging will be taking a back seat for the foreseeable. Part of me would like to just delete this blog and set up an anonymous one elsewhere at a later date. Amazingly some people do still find the odd ancient post useful and I still get regular comments, despite shamefully rarely replying. Take for example, the sorry story of so many lovely ladies with large feet that I must bring to the attention of the shoe retailers one of these days. So, I will leave everything online for now, in case the odd bit is of help to anyone. Besides, the actuary in me still likes to sneak the odd peek at the web stats and referral logs.

I hope to still pop in and out from time to time to share my trivial tales with whoever else is out there. For now, thanks to everyone who dropped by and read a few posts and special thanks to those who sent me kind emails, took the time to comment or were kind enough to link to me. When I started this blog, I never imagined anyone else would read it, so it has been really nice to get e-mails from people as far away as Brazil saying hello.

Wishing you all the best in 2007! A lot can happen in a year, so I hope the New Year brings you lots of nice surprises.

Apologies to anyone who is unable to leave a comment. I’ll post again when I think that I’ve fixed things.

Update: I’m hoping that comments should be working again now. But, the problems were only affecting some people, so it is hard to tell. Please let me know if you are still having trouble by mailing me at janinedalton at gmail dot com or sending a pigeon or smoke signal my way. Thanks!  

With wysiwyg limping along all year, I should have put it out of its misery long ago. I’m still trying to work out whether it’s just the lack of anonymity putting me off, or whether I’ve had it with blogging altogether. Before the end of the year, I’m going to make a final decision and either blog far more regularly here, blog regularly anonymously elsewhere or stop blogging full stop.

I end this post with advance warning and an apology! I’m going to start putting a few Google adverts on my blog. Nooooo! I’m selling out! Aaggggh! After many years of enduring banners and pop ups on my personal home page at Geocities etc, I vowed that my personal domain, the one spot of the web over which I have total control, would *never* *ever* have ads of any kind on it.

However, my personal domain is also the one spot on the web that is my personal playground and test bed for my web development work. I can only really learn about Google Adsense if I try it out on a site of my own first, and preferably a site that gets more than a handful of hits, which means my poor pink blog has to be the guinea pig.

I don’t think the (occasional) content is worthy enough to warrant the inclusion of adverts, and I’m not trying (or expecting!) to cover hosting costs, so don’t feel obliged to click on any of them! I’ll try to ensure they won’t be too obvious, although they may appear in different spots as I try strategies out. Even though putting ads on my blog is a very big deal to me, I’m really hoping that it won’t be for anyone else.

I noticed an annoying bug with version 2.0.3 today. When I edited a comment, it put backslashes before any apostrophes. If I edited it again, it put even more backslashes in. Upgrading to 2.0.4 seems to have fixed this and hopefully I have not broken anything in the process.

I would love to report that it was all up and running effortlessly in a few clicks, but there were quite a few niggles! I had to head off to do something half way through upgrading which is not recommended! Aside from that, my web server and FileZilla FTP seemed to be conspiring against me, leading to several zero byte sized files dotted all over the place.

Then, my feed stopped working. The WordPress Feedburner plugin seemed to be aggravating the issue. When I removed it, my feed came back. But I love that plugin! So I went looking at my .htaccess rules, trying to figure them out. My head was too bamboozled by this stage to see a way out. I did not have my .htaccess file configured to let WordPress write to it. As a final attempt, I let WordPress at it and my feed returned even with the plugin active. I’ve no idea why that should have made a difference, but at least everything *seems* to be finally working now. I’m loving the sleek new admin interface too. I had heard good things and it’s quite an improvement. I should have upgraded ages ago for more pressing reasons than a shiny control panel!

In reality probably half my poor neglected blog has been brought down by my tinkering. So, if you spot anything strange I’d greatly appreciate it if you would kindly let me know.

I noticed a few referrals from the site in my logs and lo and behold, my little pink flower icon is sitting right there! I know I have been buying up half the interweb lately, but I thought I had really lost it for a second, because I could not remember paying a dollar for my square. Then I read in the FAQ that Dave has included a few random blogs to get things rolling. I have not received the e-mail the chosen bloggers were supposed to get, but I doubt that anyone paid to include wysiwyg!

Why mine I wonder? I barely post enough for this to be considered a blog and rarely write anything useful! A whois search on the domain reveals that while it was registered on 19 January, Dave is pretty shy and would rather remain anonymous for now as the registrant details are pretty vague. if my pink kingdom made the cut, my hunch is that it’s someone I know of. Thanks Dave, whoever you are, and remember me if/when you make your million.

Since many Irish bloggers and blog readers are in hibernation at the moment this will probably go entirely unnoticed, but just in case anyone drops by and wonders where the hell certain posts have landed from, I thought I would give this heads up first.

Happy selection box eating.

A glance down planet of the blogs shows that Irish bloggers have either (sensibly) abandoned their PCs today or are doing the obligatory Merry Christmas post. I’ve left it pretty late but I thought I would experience the cliché while I could! *Happy Christmas everyone*

I have had the decorators in to make my little blog a little more festive. This layout seems to load rather strangely and is full of sloppy coding but I guess you get what you pay for these days!

Christmas Day in my house has been pretty quiet so I don’t have much to report. I am feeling rather full at present after our late Christmas dinner after 6. I hope to have semi recovered by breakfast time!

Judging from the queues first thing last Friday morning in our local Marks and Spencers, there is hardly any food left in Ireland at this stage. Even though the shutters were only going up, with the surge of trolleys rushing forward, I felt like I was competing in a giant game of Supermarket Sweep!

Yes, the shops are complete hell for several weeks leading up to Christmas but most of us get to enjoy the anticipation by the time Christmas Eve comes. Then there is the delight of Christmas morning and the Christmas feast and it’s all over for another year…

I was very lucky as usual and got some lovely presents this year including an e-dog, a cross stitch encyclopedia, a pink leather notebook, a lovely necklace and a rather arty coffee table tome entitled Taschen’s 1000 favourite websites. Hope Santa was good to all of you as well.

I’m heading down to G-G-G-Galway to see the New Year in but I shall try and post a bit more before the rat race restarts. Franz Ferdinand say it all:

It’s always better on holiday
So much better on holiday
That’s why we only work when we need the money

Happy Holidays!

The first player of this game starts with the topic “five weird habits of yourself,” and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Don’t forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says “You are tagged” (assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours.

I think I have already shared a lot of my weird ways on this blog so apologies for any repetition. In trying to think of my most entertaining eccentricities, I realised that I could not come up with much which may mean I am not much of a freak after all but I’ll let you decide!

1. My eating habits are rather unorthodox, but have greatly improved in recent years. I used to just eat crisps, sweets, chips, lamb chops and a few burnt rashers occasionally to keep my Mum happy, but now I eat chicken nuggets and grated cheese and chicken or ham sandwiches on brown bread with no butter too so I’m spoilt for choice! The strange thing is, the healthier I eat, the more often I get sick. Thus, I have discovered that the secret to a long healthy life is Haribo Tangfastics. You heard it here first.
2. Still somewhat on the food theme, I can’t stand the smell of oranges or onions and can’t bear to touch them. I’m getting a bit better with this one too in my old age, but I’m still never totally comfortable if someone cracks open a six pack of cheese and onion crisps in my midst.
3. I have issues with escalators and lifts, but can actually use either now without too much trouble. But if you see a girl taking half an hour to get onto a downward escalator try to resist the temptation to push me all the way down! When I do go down escalators, I can only stand on the right too.
4. As I recently confessed, I now do my cross-stitch embroidery on buses, or at bus stops or anywhere really. As you can tell, I love living on the edge!
5. I sleep under 2 13.5 tog duvets, even in mild weather. I always have a glass of water beside my bed (I have *something* in common with United Irelander after all ) and always have a light on as I can’t sleep or relax in complete darkness.

OK, well maybe I am a little strange after all but what does exactly is “normal” anyway?

Now for the lucky taggees!

• Mish
• Anthony McG
• Caoimhe
• DjMagra
• Blúire