I have an infant son. And I have a blog. Does this makes me a “mommyblogger?” Maybe not in the traditional sense of the term (and it is weird to think that a term coined so recently can even have a “traditional sense” yet), but I am a mom who blogs about her life and her family.

So… in what I call Reverse Mommyblogging, I shall now take you through a day in my household, and list by name and brand all the products I typically use, BEFORE I get paid to mention them!

I am not affiliated with any of these companies, and they have not paid me or sent me free products… YET. In these trying economic times, though, a few extra bucks or free products would sure come in handy, so all offers will be entertained. Do you hear me, Procter and Gamble? Get me on that free products train! I can be a corporate shill, too!

• Safety 1st baby monitor
• Apple iPhone
• Pampers Baby Dry or Cruisers size 4 diapers
• Pampers Sensitive baby wipes
• Aveeno Baby Soothing Relief Moisture Cream
• Triple Paste diaper ointment
• Gold Bond medicated baby powder
• Baby clothing by: Gymboree, Baby Gap, Carters, Circo
• Avent pacifiers
• Enfamil Nutramigen baby formula
• Gerber 2nd foods baby puree
• Healthy Times brown rice baby cereal
• Dr. Brown’s baby bottles
• Gerber Soft Bite baby food spoons
• Baby Orajel toothbrush and toothpaste
• Tom’s of Maine toothpaste
• Boston Simplicity contact lens solution
• Aussie Moist shampoo and 3 Minute Miracle Deeeeep Conditioner
• Infusium leave-in treatment
• Garnier Fructis Sleek & Shine 
Anti-Humidity Styling Cream
• Dove moisturizing soap
• Noxzema Daily Exfoliating Cleanser
• Cococare cocoa butter
• Kiss My Face Liquid Rock Patchouli deodorant
• Burt’s Bees Radiance Day Cream
• Burt’s Bees Chemical-Free Sunscreen SPF 30
• Cover Girl Trublend pressed powder
• Almay Intense I-Color eyeliner  in Raisin Quartz
• Maybelline Great Lash mascara in Black
• Burt’s Bees Lip Shimmer in Champagne
• Millstone decaf caramel truffle coffee
• Saturn SL2 automobile
• Gasoline from 7-11, Exxon, Shell, etc.
• Apple MacBook Pro
• Logitech MX Revolution wireless laser mouse
• Apple 23″ Cinema Display
• Coke Zero
• Mirado Black Warrior pencils
• Adobe Creative Suite CS4 software
• Calphalon Stainless Steel cookware
• Cascade 2-in-1 Action Pacs dishwasher detergent
• BabyGanics foaming dish and bottle soap
• Dr. Brown’s bottle brush
• Tide Free laundry soap
• Target brand baby laundry soap
• Target brand infant ibuprofen
• Target brand infant gas drops
• Aveeno Baby Soothing Relief Creamy Wash
• Sony television
• Mac mini
• Playstation 3

Over the past nine days, I have received 455 spam comments on my blog. That’s more than 50 per day. These “comments” are just huge long lists of links to porn sites or prescription drug sites or the like. Luckily my blog is set so that comments have to be approved by me before they can be posted, so none of them actually made it through. But for two days, until I had the bright idea to install the Akismet filter, I had to wade through piles of comments to weed out the spam.

So. If you are a friend or a real live non-robot non-spamming stranger and you plan to leave me a comment, do make sure that you don’t include more than one or two links or your comment may be filtered out. And with the volume I’m getting, I don’t have time to sift through them all to check for legitimate comments that might have been caught.

That is all. Thank you.

Yesterday I successfully transferred my blog to Wordpress! It was quite easy, in fact. I’d say the setup and transfer took all of 30 minutes. Formatting my template was the hard part and I still have some tweaking to do. Now I can post from my iPhone, which was one of the major factors in my decision.

I am in the process of switching my blog from Blogger to Wordpress. Hopefully I can get this done before Mr. Baby arrives. So there might not be much activity here for a few days (not that that is anything new) while I try to switch everything over. If I can’t get my custom template working in Wordpress then I might just use one of their standard templates for a while… so if the look of this blog suddenly changes on you, that’s why!

A co-worker forwarded a really fantastic article from Smashing Magazine, about new standards in web design. The good news is, I appear to be doing a lot of things right in my design work. Although the survey analyzed large blogs, I think the results can apply to any type of site. Here is a summary; the percentages in parentheses indicate the percentage of surveyed sites conforming to the standard:

• large blogs require a multi-column layout solution (usually 3 columns suffice) (58%);
• layouts are usually centered (94%),
• layouts usually have a fixed width (px-based) (92%),
• the width of the fixed layout varies between 951 and 1000px (56%),
• 58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content,
• CSS-layouts are used (90%),
• the background is light, the body text is dark (98%),
• the most usual (not necessarily most user-friendly) line length lies between 80 and 100 characters,
• Verdana, Lucida Grande, Arial and Georgia are used for body text (90%),
• the font size of body text varies between 12 and 14px (78%),
• Arial and Georgia are used for headlines (52%),
• headlines have the font size between 17 and 25px.

 

Hi! Yes, I have changed my masthead from that indescribable mass of orange and green brushstrokes to a photo of storm clouds.

My annual urge to redesign my blog has taken over. Stay tuned for the final version.

OK, people, help me out here. I’m anonymizing (is that a word?) this blog, and as such, I am going to remove my name from anywhere it’s mentioned. But I need to call myself something. Should I just use my first name? Is there something else you can think of that would work? Should it tie in to the name of the blog? (Something Shiny Disorder)?

I know that there is no shortage of opinions amongst my readers, so chime in!

This weekend I am making A Big Switch. No, not the kind where a PC user sees the light and switches to a Mac. I got my first Mac in 1995 and never looked back, except fondly on my previous Apple experiences which included my dad’s Apple ][ and Apple ][e in the 1980s; PCN's Mac Classic – or was it a Plus? – in college on which I played many a game of Risk and typed many a paper; and the Mac LCII (with a COLOR SCREEN and blindingly fast 16Mhz processor!) that I got to use at my job in college.

But I digress.

For a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I'm beginning to really need a professional site promoting my growing freelance art and design business, I plan to break off this blog and my personal pages from the rest of this website and put them at a completely new URL: somethingshinydisorder.com!

The two sites won't be tied together anymore, mainly because I don't necessarily want my professional clients to have a direct link to my personal rantings and ravings. Also, I think that I'm going to go anonymous with somethingshinydisorder.com. I'm not sure if I will go back and edit previous posts that refer to myself or my friends and family by name. That would be a lot of work. I might just take out last names, although I'm not sure if I've even used those anywhere.

So if you have my "old" site bookmarked, my blog won't be there anymore. Please bookmark www.somethingshinydisorder.com!

Who are you?

I’m interested in knowing who reads my ramblings. Please post a comment and tell me your name, where you are located, and how you found my blog. You can also link back to your own website if you like. Feel free to leave any other comments, too!

Thanks! :D

according to my site statistics, people find me most often while doing searches for the following keywords:

• filliam h. muffman
• naked boobs (which i think i mentioned ONCE in a post about renaissance faires)
• holy hand gernade (yes, misspelled)
• stump google
• kyocera lip fungus

and my top hits actually come from people doing google image searches for…

1. this image (thus the “naked boobs” search term, methinks)
2. this image
3. this image
4. this image

yeah. i don’t know what gets into my head.

i’ve spent three to four hours for the past two nights trying to fix my new layout so it will work in internet fucking explorer. that is its official name, by the way: “internet fucking explorer.” i don’t care if 90% of the world uses it as its primary browser; it is a piece of shit.

so, anyway, this OUGHT to work better. at least, it works structurally in IE for the mac, most of the time. i have no idea what it looks like on IE for the pc, because, in a when-hell-freezes-over kind of way, i do not own one. i can check it at work tomorrow or if one of my three very kind and helpful pc-using friends whose names start with a “b” can check for me, that’ll be even better. :)

i’m beyond caring how it looks on IE mac, but i would like it to work in IE pc simply because i have a lot of readers who use that particular platform and browser — and much as i would prefer that to be different, it ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. anyway, mac IE seems to be a good litmus test for pc IE — at least IE5.5.

i forgot to upload this last week. it actually rained!! i was so excited that i took photos on the way to work, but forgot my camera’s usb cable so couldn’t actually upload any. don’t worry, i had the camera stationary on the steering wheel and just hit the button without actually aiming or composing. my eyes were on the road the whole time!

this first one was taken at the intersection of northwest highway and buckner.

 

this one was taken at the end of my street, looking across plano road towards the sonic (open for breakfast! shining that bright red neon glow through the windows of the houses! “you’ll never forget we have tater tots and strawberry cheesecake shakes, any time of the day or night!!!!”)

i spent much of the weekend practicing my CSS, and have thusly refined my blog template. i’m not sure that this works in internet explorer for the pc… i suppose i can find a pc at work and check it out. i know that it blows up in ie for the mac. i’m trying to decide if i care, or if i can find a workaround either in CSS (preferably) or through a javascript browser sniffer and redirect.

if you’re on a pc and are having trouble with my site, please let me know. sending a screenshot would be most helpful!