MissLeonie.com

Don’t worry - you haven’t put your contacts in backwards, drunk too much or misplaced your glasses. The text size has just decreased a fair bit. I was getting a little sick of the humongous text, so I asked Liam to have a look at the style.css file for me. He asked why I didn’t just make a backup and mess around with it myself. Good question.

The best part? It worked! I totally did this myself. (I know it’s kind of sad that it inspires such pride in me, but dude, CSS!)

PS. I’ve also added Twitter to my sidebar. I thought I’d give it a go and what do you know, it didn’t crash the site. Twitter, in case you don’t know (here’s looking at you, mum and dad), is a service that lets you send short updates of what you’re up to to the people following your twitter stream or those reading your website, in this case. They’re like mini-updates that would look too pathetic as a post on their own. It’s Facebook, without the annoying superpokes, pets and vampire kisses. I’m not sure if it’s permanent, but I’ll give it a try for now. As I said to Liam though, if I start tweeting about my breakfast - shoot me.

PPS. The http://www.missleonie.com address works again! It’ll send you here, so you can forget the German.

Posting is still a little light and will likely remain so until I finish my dissertation. I currently have about 11,000 words to go, which sounds more terrible than it is, albeit only just. I have some idea of where I’m going with this which gives me some confidence (and apparently a certain aloofness that makes it seem as though I am not worried - trust me, I am. Most actively). I am baffled by the speed with which time races past, blink and you’ll miss it-style. I handed my last papers in on the 6th of May. That is almost three months ago, and I have yet to make a good dent in the 12,000 words minimum I need to hand in in another month’s time. Frightening.

Nevertheless, I have spent the time between then and now thinking about my topic, mulling it over, letting the ideas ripen. I’ve been looking around, trying to find the confidence to start this massive project, only to realise that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t take courage to write a dissertation - it takes a lot of courage not to. As terrible as anything I write may be, it is better than not writing anything. No one needs to see it, not until I’m done polishing it up - and I need to create something to polish first.

So if you’ll excuse me, it’s high time for me to get back to clumsily explaining relief from restraint theory with respect to humour. And possibly find some more sources to back up my waffle. It’s pretty sensible waffle, so far. I’ll get there. :)

I’m back!

I’m hoping to write a few posts about my holiday to the Lake Garda region of Italy, but I’m a little tired and still trying to work out how I’m going to go about it. I had the best time, but the trip home was tiring and I’m still finding my feet and preparing to pour all my Italian Illy coffee energy into doing a good job on my dissertation.

I had the best time in Italy. The smells (sweet omnipresent oleander), the colours (terracotta and warm yellow houses, sage-green olive trees, turqoise-blue water), the views (lakes, mountains, sometimes both), the weather (sunny and at least 35°C), the food (pizzas, sweet sun-ripened tomatoes, limoncello)… I couldn’t have had a better time. Well, that’s a lie. I could have had a slightly better time if it hadn’t been so hot, so I could have visited Venice again. But really, dunking yourself in a swimming pool and a lake with a view of the Italian landscape is a damn good alternative.

I read three books from one of our two hammocks (tied between two olive trees), slept in it during siestas, watched the blackbird families scout for worms and a drink, let two curious kids have a go, looked up at the stars from it at night, then fell asleep in it until the daytime heat abated and I could transfer myself to my bed in our caravan. It was a fairly hammock-oriented holiday.

I took a gazillion photos, some of which I took with the intention of turning them into wallpapers and putting them up on the site. The rest of them will most likely appear on Flickr once I’ve had a good look at them.

Now, wallpapers. They’ll most likely be in widescreen format, although I haven’t completely made up my mind about that yet. I have a widescreen laptop myself, and I always struggle to find nice desktop images (though InterfaceLIFT has a good selection), so perhaps I’ll be able to help a few people out with the ones I make for myself. I may change my mind and put them up in a regular size and shape as well, but for the moment, here is the first one in widescreen format. It’s a picture I took at a botanical garden while on holiday. Click the small image for the full-sized (1280×800) wallpaper.

Now for the copyright-technical drivel (you can skip this if you just plan to use the wallpaper on your own computer, full stop): (more…)

Yesterday evening my housemate and I organised a very informal dinner party for our fellow students from the MA. It was great fun, and I’m happy to report that I don’t have RSI despite making enough dough for eight pizzas, and rolling out and topping said eight pizzas over the course of the night. I had a lovely time.

Today, I’m going to pack up a little suitcase so I can leave for the airport nice and early tomorrow. I’m flying off to Italy to stay with my parents (who are already there) for a week, so I won’t be posting. I hope everyone has a great week, and when I get back, there will be pictures!

I signed into WordPress today and look what I found! The wonderful Lanx has written up a post about this site and added me to her Favourite Webbies! I’m completely surprised and shocked in the very best way there is. Thank you so much! You’re very kind and I am blushing. I resemble the cherries from my last post.

Now, I just have to add that I can’t possibly take credit for the design, since this is pretty much the WordPress default. The only difference is that the top banner is all my work. I don’t know how to code CSS, so I can’t change anything at this stage, but I’m hoping to learn how to eventually.

Anyway, thanks again Lanx, and anyone reading this should totally pop over to her blog. She’s got some really interesting links, as well as incredible photos from a recent holiday. If you are stuck in the Northern Hemisphere, they’ll make you long for the summer you’ll never have, but in a good living-vicariously way. Her graphics are pretty awesome too. Go on, click the link. You know you want to.

I have finally worked out how I ended up on the hobo bag site, and I love the sites that helped me get there so much that I think it’s only fair I explain how.

The lovely Loobylu linked to How About Orange as part of her March links. How About Orange is the personal website of designer Jessica Jones, who linked to J. Caroline Creative and her Hobo Bag pattern, which I talked about in an earlier post. Turns out that the gorgeous fabric used to make the example hobo bag was actually designed by Jessica Jones. It allll makes sense to me now.

Anyway, I’m loving How About Orange so much that I’m going to add it to the links section. It’s well-designed, diverse yet interesting, and an original mix of design, craft and personal stories.

Remember that I wrote about being on the shortlist for a Schmap.com guide? Guess what? I’m in!

If you click this link and let it load fully, it should take you straight to my photo. It will look like it’s finished loading before it actually is a few times, so be patient and be sure not have the mouse hover over anything else on the page, or it will blink away. Alternatively, select Parliament House in the middle list of attractions, and hit the red arrow pointing to the right next to the little photos in the top right corner until you get to me ;)

I’m all flattered and excited, but there is one small problem: the featured photo is the penultimate one on my free Flickr account, which only allows for my last 200 photos to be visible. This means that it will disappear if I upload two more photos, unless I purchase a pro account. Food for thought :)

Dear Copycat,

I know that on some level being copied could be considered a compliment, but I really can’t say I feel particularly flattered. It makes me wonder why people put effort into a ‘personal’ website, if they outsource ‘their’ ideas, ‘their’ links and even ‘their’ photos to someone else’s creativity. Why bother, exactly? I’m not going to name and shame, but I hope that you know who you are and will take a good look at what you’re doing. It’s not clever and it’s not cool. Try being original for a change. You know what they say - you’re always going to be second-best if you’re copying someone else. And if you didn’t know, you do now.

Yours annoyedly,
I’d Like My Stuff Attributed Thanks

What do you know - I received an email yesterday letting me know that one of my Flickr photos has been shortlisted to appear on the Canberra entry of Schmap.com! I’m incredibly chuffed to have even been contacted about this, so I had no problem whatsoever licensing my image (Can you believe that?! Licensing something? Me? Ha!) to the website. I’d never heard of them before, but it looks like quite the cool travel planning website, with a tonne of Lonely Planet style entries online. It’s probably worth having a look at if you plan to travel somewhere or just feel like checking out pictures from cities all over the world.

I’m not entirely sure about how things go from here, except that the deadline to OK your photo as being on the shortlist is the 27th of April. When the Canberra guide comes out I’ll be receiving an email letting me know if my photo made it into the final guide. Fingers crossed!

Hello! Things look a bit different since last time you visited, don’t they?

I’ve finally transferred the site to WordPress, which means I will no longer have to manually code every single entry, and, more importantly, every single archive link. Hurray! WordPress comes with more fanciness, like comments and RSS feeds, should you feel thus inclined. Lucky for me, WordPress for Leonie comes with the wonderful Liam helping me out occasionally. You don’t understand - PHP and CSS are Greek to me. No speaky.

I’m not happy with the design as it is right now, but I wanted the site up and running. At least it’s a little more personal than the standard WordPress default. I’ll work on the design later, though. I figured, the longer I wait with the big transfer, the more work it will be. This January, faced with having to add a little “January 2008″ link to every single page of the website, I decided enough was enough. The DNS server then decided to join me, because as far as I know, MissLeonie.com points at a funky cPanel screen right now. Anyway, this site, albeit a beta, now has all posts the previous one did (though that one still exists too, just in case).

Have a look around and feel free to leave me a comment about how you like the new format. Enjoy!

PS. And I swear I didn’t plan it: this first post on the new design is # 201.