So, I’m going to fix those, but that will have to be tomo later today because it’s 1:32 a.m. right now and I can’t handle any more tweaking of anything at this point yet still I do love the design portion of things.

Anyway, I hope people like the layout. I thought it would brighten things up a bit. The framework is called “Hope” and all I’ve done is change the header to one of my own design. The original layout author is Patrick Chia and we thank him greatly for the niftiness that is his coding.

We may still do that, we’re negotiating things at the moment. While I have been able to get things all but fixed, in part due to me re-depositing some cash I had taken out of the ATM a few days ago along with money Kore gave us for our anniversary celebrations of this past weekend, and to me returning $40 worth of items thanks to a friend and client pre-paying me for her website design based on my previous “awesomeness” as she put it, and a few other friends taking up our services as a tarot reader. Now it rests on the bank to follow through and reverse two overdraft charges. I have at least another hour before I find out about that though as they’re not open yet.

I wonder if volunteering home-made strawberry jam will help with that. I had plans to make it yesterday, but with everything going on I didn’t. I felt I shouldn’t taint the jam with my negativity. So, we’ll see about getting it sorted today. In between finishing off the outstanding web design. I have a “memorial” page to finish and then the previously mentioned friend’s oceanic themed blog layout to work on; and some things to catch up on with various of my own blogs.

I’m still debating taking down my graphic design website, and just to work freelance here and there. I don’t promote myself enough for one, and also I think perhaps if I put it on my personal LJ I might remember to update it more often…it’s usually woefully out of date on here, despite me converting it to wordpress and putting it on the sub-domain. Plus then it would not have the Ami-chan name attached to it, but at the same time…that would be three name changes of the business from Cerulean Cat when I still had ceruleansoul.com, to ami-chan.net Designs, after I tried to save money by deleting some domain names and put the site on here, to something associated with Faith Journai.

So, I just don’t know. I really don’t. I suppose we’ll see where the chips fall. As Jay said yesterday, “it is decreed “This too shall pass” worry not about these small things for they are dust in the wind.”

In the mean time if you would like a tarot reading, to have some custom jewelry made or some web design work done, banners made or icons made or something of that nature, let me know

Now the past few days have been a little weird for other respects as Max has been out the most and even though there’s been work that he’s supposed to have been doing, because we all need to do the online work he focused more on things in the house.
However, he’s been a little iffy on writing on the blogs because he considers himself ‘stupid’ and also because I’m mostly the one who writes and even though this blog in particular is about all of us he figures that he shouldn’t.
So, I’m figuring that I will do an intro for everyone or invite them to introduce themselves and we can do things here the way we do on our livejournal which is if different alters write the entry is tagged with them. Perhaps we will do separate “pages” for each of us. I’ve been planning on changing the layout on this blog for a while but it got put off with the computer issues, and then for other things.
I’ve been somewhat forced to change the LJ layout because something screwy was going on with the code. So, we’ll see what I can come up with for here, after I get a couple of client projects off the ground.

Any time a client comes to me know with images that they want me to use on their website I use it, and on several occasions it has saved my butt. After a time when I used a fairy image to make a header for someone and then found out that it was a copyrighted image I made sure to double and triple check usually by asking friends if they’d seen it being used anywhere, as I have several friends who are pretty active in artistic circles.

Now I can check myself.

Today a client came to me with an image of a double rainbow arching over a tree. As soon as I saw it I knew that it was a stolen image, and I knew that she had probably innocently saved it from an email forward because it looked pretty with no idea that it was someone’s creation. I’ve seen the image all over the web and when I put it into tin-eye it popped up on many forums and many people’s websites lumped in long lists of images that were probably also stolen from other places.

I did however turn up the original creator of the image D. Bush from Missouri Skies who took the image in 2006 with a fish eye lens.

Sad to say this image is featured in so many places and many people don’t care who originally took the picture. The more I become assured in crafting designs and images the more cautious I become; because I begin to understand the amount of work which goes into making a design. There are many images that are so widely used that they tend towards public domain, but there are many more which are not. They are photographs taken by someone, or artwork drawn by someone which they’ve put in their portfolio and has been taken.

I remember a few months ago reading an article by a comic book artist on deviantART who was berated by a “fan” who came to him with pictures of his artwork which he had printed out from his home computer and flew into a rage when the artist wouldn’t sign them. Given he realized that the “fan” was then going to go home put the pictures on eBay and sell them for a profit because the value came from the artist’s autograph not from the few pence he spent on ink and paper, because that was a greater profit than if he purchased the prints that the artist was selling that day.

Times are tough, true, and everyone is looking to save a little money but we should try to respect that if we do use an image that someone else made we’re stealing from them.

However, I also realized I needed to challenge myself, do something different, shake things up, and that opportunity presented itself the other night when my good friend Huushi who runs Saturn Faerie asked me if I could redo her LJ layout. We were chatting about what she wanted and I started to get ideas and see patterns and overlays and some nifty ways of doing things, and I actually began to get excited. This was new. This wasn’t just mimicking Ami, this was something *I* had come up with, and I’m very pleased with the way things turned out and also very pleased that Huushi really likes it; you can see it in action here Forest Life.

I can’t take credit for making the faerie because she was designed by Moon Childe and the forest comes from some stock photography of Joanna Star but the layering, the effects, making the faerie’s wings semi translucent and making the forest sparkle, and the animated friends banner and the faerie based icon those were all me; and it has me extremely excited to do these things again, for which I’m very grateful.

I’ve already found a few things I don’t like; the main one is that it’s not storing my passwords. I’ve got the options checked so that it should prompt me to save my passwords and it’s not doing it. There are several fixes suggested on google’s website and I’ve tried all of them and still nothing. It’s sad to say but this is almost enough for me to switch back, except Firefox was freezing so often that I would probably smash the computer after a few more days of that issue.

It’s just that memory and passwords are a big issue for me given there are so many that I use and so many times where I just don’t recall which one is where, plus several of us have different passwords that we use also which can make it difficult. I can’t recall the number of times I’ve had to reset passwords for various employers and resume sites, and various email accounts, or suddenly discovered that I have an account somewhere because I’ve received an email from it and have no idea what the place is about or how to disable the account, as happened recently with HaloScan, or more recently with GE who holds the account that we got our water treatment system under.

I would say I’m hopeful that Google will fix the password issue, except that the comments on their FAQ about it date back to early 2009…so almost a year and it’s not been fixed, and apparently is getting worse given the “add-on/extension” I was directed to from comments in November of last year does not actually work the way that several people purport it to.

Ah, well…I suppose I can use Firefox for something when I need to log in and am not sure of the password and hopefully it won’t freeze and crash if I’m just opening one browser window…but you never know.

I still need to fix the widgets, but it’s past midnight and that’s seriously enough for me right now. My eyes are crossing. I want to re-upload some design portions I’m hosting for several people so that their sites work and then I’ll focus on the rest of things tomorrow because I do need to get some sleep tonight. I only got five hours yesterday between various things.

Then I can catch up with everything else that’s important. Seriously glad that I was able to figure out what was going on when I tried to reinstall the databases so that I could actually get them to work. I know it’s not as if I have my own brand or franchise at the moment but these sites are my livelihood, so it’s very serious for me to make sure that they’re working and that I’m my best (even though I’m not going off to the Dollhouse). So, I decided to myself that despite the fact that drak wonderfully ported everything it might still serve me to delete everything and start from scratch anyway because then I would be able to get rid of things that I didn’t need and I found several huge areas of my site that really didn’t need to be up any more. I had portions of old joomla and phpBB installs still hovering around on the server and many other things which will now be gone, so that should help make sure that there aren’t any back doors that people can sneak through.

I may yet be contacted by the FBI about the situation, I suppose it depends how many people he was able to scam before Paypal noticed and got in touch with my wonderful host drak.net who locked everything down, about ten-fifteen minutes total, but that’s a long time in the internet world, and an even
longer time while they went through everything everywhere with a fine tooth comb and checked for backdoors and other issues of scripts and made sure everything was clean, and I went through everything on this computer and made sure there wasn’t a virus or something here.

As it happens the time it turns out that the malicious scripts were initially put in my site corresponds almost exactly with the last time that my computer went down and had to go in the shop, the beginning of September.

Everything I’ve looked at indicates that things are clean now, but I’m still extremely paranoid about everything and at the same time I feel violated, because they were in my sites, they built themselves a subdomain and an email and I did not see they were there for THREE MONTHS, even though during that time my site wound up sending out several hundred spam emails and got locked down. I thought I had caught everything, but they were hiding out in my shades subdomain, which I haven’t updated in over a year, so I didn’t see them, and then they waltzed in and used me to attempt to scam people out of money.

I’m extremely grateful to both Jen at drak.net and Steve at Liquid Web who not only managed to restore my site to working order within two days, but were able to do so without having to nuke and pave the entire thing and me having to start over from almost scratch in case my site back ups had viruses or malicious script in them.

They’ve enabled me to keep a good portion of my livelihood going, and that is wonderful and I’m eternally grateful and in their debt.

I was talking on Joyful Path this morning about how I’m trying to find ways to actual figure out the social media madness. I know I went about things the wrong way for a while because I wasn’t being “out” about my mental state, so anything to do with the multiplicity was on a separate blog and that blog had it’s own twitter account, it’s own bloglog account, it’s own technorati and on and on and on. That was too much to deal with, and in spending so much time keeping everything “separate and equal” I never actually learned how to use any of them properly.

Then, of course, I got burned out.

When I decided “screw it” and merged everything together opened up about my mental condition and condensed down all those various accounts I have at least been able to find a bit more in the way of time, but I still don’t really know how to actually make these things work. I now only have the one twitter (are you following me? am I following you? I may be! I don’t know!!), down from three, but I still have two facebooks, down from four.

How does a person wind up with four facebooks? Well, considering how many alters I have I’m lucky I didn’t wind up with ten, really! So I have my facebook and then there’s the one that’s the more public facebook I suppose, which people find when they’re looking for tarot readings and the like, and actually has all the “family photos” and things like that on it. Though I do use mine to showcase all the fun graphic design things that I do.

Still, I realize that especially with the short burst nature of twitter and the way facebook really seems to go with all the games and “add me so I can level up in the games” crap that goes on there doesn’t actually seem to be all that much real connecting that I do, it’s all “like” “like” “why isn’t there a dislike button?” “ooh shiny” move on. occasionally there’ll be some conversation but it’s very much, dig for treasure, farm produce, move on; and I tick myself off with it because I get obsessed (I have that issue) with points and details and the stupid games and don’t do more productive things. I keep going through and deleting games and then adding different ones to replace the hole instead of actually doing something productive.

So, on that front I’ve given myself an ultimatum that if I go back and add more games after I delete them this time facebook is going to have to go until I get this under control, but at the same time I do need to figure out how to actually “work the system” instead of having it work me over.

I see people doing it. They network, they connect, they even going to conferences and actually interact physically with the vast number of men and women out there. There are tons of fellow bloggers out there who are doing this, who understand about these things, yet all I seem to find as I said on my other blog post is conflicting information: some say you shouldn’t link twitter and facebook, others swear by it, some say that you shouldn’t post on twitter, sorry “tweet” when you update your blog, others say you should because it drives traffic that way, but I suppose people are already supposed to know because they’re already supposed to be subscribed?

I would really appreciate if any of you fellow bloggers out there who might actually be reading could give me a few pointers to help me cut through the clutter and start to get the ball rolling without it carrying me down the hill and off a cliff. Thank you!