I Have Returned

First of all I just want to announce I'm not dead! I just did something really stupid. You know when you get (yet another) bill in the door and you think it's OK to ignore it? Well I got a few Google warnings saying my domain was going to expire and I needed to update my payment settings. I got these at a really bad time when every bill in my whole life seemed to be late, so it seemed pretty low down on the list after lighting and my rent.

Oh how silly of me!

I didn't give it too much thought and I let the domain name expire, thinking it would be really easy to fix. But it really wasn't. At first I thought someone has purchased it and was squatting on the site. Queue complete hysterical freak out where I had a shouting melt down in my kitchen(I thought I lost 5 years worth of a blog). After consulting a few tech savvy friends I found out a bit more(thanks Dave and Jess), but I was still no nearer to a solution.

Then two things happened; A)I arranged a meeting for Limerick Craft and Design B)some of the committee were late, so I had an hour to chat to Neville about my problem. Add in a dash of free Wifi, and a sprinkle of an iPad and we were a few steps closer to resolving the issue. Neville then donned his super hero cape and called over to my house to save the day, and my website. 

Neville is not just a tango teaching, fencing, photo taking mastermind, he is also a computer superhero too in his spare time. If you have a moment head over to his website and have a gander through his lovely photos.

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Blog Signature How-To(Kinda!)

After much to-ing and fro-ing over the past few months I'm eventually happy with the box at the end of my blog posts. It's gone through a few variations, and to be honest if I was on Wordpress it would have been as easy as a few clicks and a plugin. But sadly blogger is a bit more fiddly!!

Eventually I found some html code for making a box with some text on the inside of it(if you go to the link it's at the very bottom). It gave me the basics to start with then I did loads of editing on the code to make it the colour and dimensions that I wanted. I'm not very good at coding but I have a few scraps of knowledge in the recesses of my brain, but to be honest it makes my head hurt.

I had seen these boxes on Wordpress blogs and thought the looked lovely and was convinced that they would improve return traffic. I especially liked the ones with the pictures in them, so I made it my mission to figure out how to make one! Firstly I copy and pasted the code into a new blog post and went into the html view and then made the following changes
widened the bar to 680px
shortened the height to 80px
background colour to white
lowered the font to medium
font colour to black
(all this can be changed by reading the html carefully and changing the values accordingly)

Then things started to get a little tricky. I started with my basic sentence 'Thanks for stopping by my blog!....'You 'll see the highlighted area above listed as number two, place whatever text you like in here, I recommend typing the full sentence first then add your links afterwards. To get your Rss Feed just highlight 'rss feed' and click link enter what you see inside the quotation marks at number 3, but make sure to replace my url with your own before it says 'feeds/post/default'. To add links to your facebook/twitter just highlight and click link and put in the appropriate links when prompted. I also like to add target="_blank" after the link  and before the '>' bracket as this opens the page in a new tab.

The next tricky bit is the image.Firstly I uploaded my image to photobucket and copied the link. See the
I do apologise for not being able to post html that you can copy and past(I don't know how to do it!, when retyped it it came up as another image box), but if you retype exactly what I have in the image above, but just replace it with your own links you should get your own text box for your blog posts.

All you do to make sure this shows up on each of your blog posts is to copy the finished html go to 'settings', then 'posts and comments', and paste into 'post template'. If you can figure out my half baked code gibberish and you attempt this please let me know, also if you have any questions just leave them in the comments section and I'll try my best to help you out.

Good Luck!!

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My first attempt at an image rollover!

I'm feeling ever so slightly chuffed with myself. I just spent the past hour and a half doing a completely pointless computer nerd task!I learned how to do an image rollover using CSS. Armed with my new knowledge I had to pop over to Photoshop to make an image worthy of such a fancy rollover!


Et Voila a phone poptastic homage to Blondie's 'Hangin' on the telephone'.


I was inspired by the fabulous Pugly Pixel as she has a very pretty collage how-to, and I got the code from Say Point. I would like to know how to make it centred though. Keep an eye out for more rollovers on the blog, although they may be a bit more subtle than this one.


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Come Have a Look....

I thought I'd show you some pictures of where i spend half of my day...my computer. I was inspired by this great blog desked I found that shows peoples' work spaces, and I got such a kick of having a nose. The blog seems to be inactive now, but you can still have a look at all the old posts.

So here is my little corner! I love it, it's right in the middle of our open plan downstairsd living area. So if John is watching a dvd I can still chat away to him. It means I can still do all my listing/promoting/blogging and not feel too isolated. Also a couple of weeks ago John moved all my design/research books beside the computer which makes perfect sense. We reclaimed the chair from a skip, the bookshelf from the side of the road, and the table is a hand me down from my folks...don't worry I bought the computer! The map on the wall is the research project that John spent two years doing. It is an illustrated map of medevil Limerick....can you tell I'm very proud of him?

Death Wish Computer

I think my computer has a dead wish. It wants me to kill it, to pick it up and throw it out of the second story window beside me. If I have another day like today it might just happen. After lots of swearing, screaming and pleading I got another few things posted on etsy today. It's a pitiful amount compared to what should be there but I'm blaming this suicidal machine on front of me.