As you may have noticed, Ides of May has taken on a new look for spring. I’m working on changing all my sites over to this new theme. The colours will vary as I do like some variety. My thanks to my niece Megan for her help with colour suggestions and the neat font for the new headers. She’s got a great eye for colour and balance!

In the last several weeks I’ve been designing and making notecards. These are cards with a design on the cover and blank inside for the sender to write their notes in. I know, people send emails these days, but there is still value in sending someone a note written in one’s own hand. I know I don’t do so enough.

Notecards also make great gifts when inscribed with the person’s name. Last year when I went hunting for some notecards to send out notes of thanks to people who had helped and been supportive during dad’s illness and death I really couldn’t find any to my liking. I settled for a set more for expediency than because I liked them.

Over the last year or so I’ve also been doing more photography. Taking my camera along and capturing more of my world around me. Somehow, matching  some of those shots to sets of notecards seemed a good match. With a bit of digital playing, I’ve achieved some effects I’m comfortable reproducing for sale on notecards.

Today, I’m releasing a blog which I’ve separated off from Ides of May, called Notecards for You. Stay tuned for more sets to be released.

I have released a new blog today - Ides of Books. As some may have noticed, I enjoy reading. I decided that I’d create a separate blog where I can talk about the books I have read, books I’m reading, books I’d like to read or other book related news and commentary. Hope you find something to enjoy over there. Don’t forget, you can keep an eye on Patti’s Network News to know where I’ve been posting.

Wordpress, which is the blogging package my blogs run on, released a major update to their package this past week. After spending some time exploring some of the wordpress guru sites looking for the updating horror stories I decided to update mine.

I didn’t find a lot of update horror stories which was a good sign. My hosting package provides me with a pretty easy installation panel called Fantastico through which I can do my updates with just a click of a button. So far, any updates I’ve done through the panel has really gone well. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve changed the theme this blog is set up on. I switched my Out of the Shadows over to the same theme a couple of days ago and really liked the look so this blog and my It’s All About Money blog are undergoing a change to the same theme. I’ll alter some of the colours and fonts between them but I like the 3 column layout. Gives me more flexibility displaying items.

I’ve been working on all of my blogs, freshening them up getting more focused on the subject areas of each blog.

I’ve added a category  which I hope will see very few entries filed. It is for filing the entries which will be made when a Canadian soldier dies in Afghanistan. I’ve called it Brave Canadians. This has been created in response to the Canadian government choosing to end the practice of lowering the flag on the Peace Tower in Ottawa. If all Canadian blogs and media displayed a half mast flag and the name of the fallen it would send a more powerful message to the families than a lone flag in Ottawa.

I’ve found a style sheet that works in IE for this theme. Well, mostly works. There is a customization that I did which isn’t working right but for the most part the pages display properly in IE. Needless to say, I’ll be adding a GET FIREFOX button to the site as soon as I can.

Well DAMN! I just learned that while this theme works great in Firefox.. it is major broken crap in Internet Explorer. SO.. back to the damn drawing board and I was really liking this theme. Guess I will have to go hunting for a similar theme that works in IE.. either that or post a HUGE notice telling my IE visitors to get a damn real browser.

Guess I better head off to bed before I get really ticked.

OK… this blog has sat here since last July without a focus. So, now it has a focus, it just doesn’t have style… that will follow.

I’ve noticed that I spend a lot of time posting about news items over at Out of the Shadows, (well the last month or so I haven’t done a lot of that) and somehow it doesn’t seem to be a good match to be commenting on news items at the same time as doing a personal journal.

SOOO, this blog just became my personal journal and Out of the Shadows becomes my comment on the world.. so to speak. They will sometimes overlap but I’ll try to avoid repetition. I’ll move some of the personal stuff off of Out of the Shadows and bring them here.