I have literally just finished as much as I can do on the new look UNIMA Australia design, and ’sent’ it off for a round of beta testing to the committee members. I’ve spent the last four days holed up trying to push through as much on my to do list as possible; and yet, even after sending the committee members their login details, I still discovered stuff to fix.

It’s been like that the whole time: I solve one thing, only to notice five other things along the way. Today I spent most of it configuring new display options because I managed to solve one major problem (a banner module not showing up when you try to send an email to UNIMA but fail the security check) and it mucked up a whole bunch of settings in the process. Nothing bad or requiring re-coding, just a lot of time spent pressing buttons and finding conflicts. 

Unfortunately, I also tend to waste a lot of time on the aesthetics: several hours updating and making nice the menu links, which use images. To get it right took a little while, especially as I discovered that the free paint program I use saves .png files in a way that Paint Shop Pro doesn’t like (it turns transparencies into black in PSP). All of this, of course, was a side tangent from making the site banner prettier and matching the menu links - something I forgot to do. - I’m really glad I took the time to do all of this though, because the whole thing is a little less glary and a little more smooth; funky and fun colours without being too in-your-face (I hope). A little change to the menu items and all looks a whole lot better.

Another time waster was having to install a new links directory because it was mentioned at our last meeting (the committee meeting) that it should be reciprocal - a good idea, although not something I’d thought of already and had something else installed that didn’t offer reciprocal links automatically. From there I had a fun time of figuring out where to change the language for the email notifications - the grammar was not even Spanglish - because surprise surprise, the language for the emails in the language file was not actually the language used…

Even though I managed to get through all of the stuff on my ‘to do’ list, it’s really not quite like that at all. I got through the ’small’ list, with an even bigger (and growing) list of small stuff that I know nobody will notice, but is still important to get right.

There are even some pretty huge problems still left to fix, mainly with getting the blog to fit the rest of the site. 

… Anyway, I’m done. For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to check in occasionally to make sure the test area hasn’t crashed or gotten hacked (unlikely, but I don’t like Joomla because it’s incredibly hack-y), but for the most part… I’m free!

This is going to be my opportunity to hang back, do something else, and get away from the computer. And in case you were wondering… yep, I’m getting code-crazy. I really want to do some other stuff now, so more puppetry things are on their way. That’s what I’ll be doing for two weeks. And by then, it will be my birthday and the next UNIMA committee meeting!

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