Or, to put it more succinctly: :P

A couple of weeks ago I had movement on some UNIMA Aus. stuff that allows me to fix up the last two pages of the new site design. Whilst this is good news, it does mean that I am back to the grind with coding stuff. I got one page 90% done at which point my head exploded (that and I had to wait for some support from the developers) and I took a week to decompress. But now I’m feeling a bit impatient, because it’s April and I said I’d have this thing done in October. (Er yeah, that was really good planning Na!)

Welp, I started off this week by finishing the other 10% and being happy enough to consider it ‘locked off’, I moved on to the last page. Unfortunately, it’s also the page that’s been giving me the biggest problems: the blog. Since I’m using Joomla I figured there’s no point in having a separate blog program, but Joomla’s blogging capabilities are . More than that, a b2evo bridge that UNIMA would have had to pay for seemed completely unsupported (even emails to the developer went unanswered); fortunately this weekend I discovered the program is now free… and just as as the rest of them.

My work seemed easier then, when I found the perfect blogging thing. Only to discover yesterday that it seems to have triggered a server-side firewall, forcing my IP address to be locked out. 

So I’ve lost a whole day (figuring it may have been a simple server-overload, or some sort of timeout) and have been trying to catch up. It seems now, before I can move on, I need to go through every single thing I’ve done and make sure it’s up-to-date and not a security risk. So yet more time must be wasted… On top of which the component that likely caused the issue isn’t working as expected, and it may look like I need to use a different one, despite the former being paid for and the latter being free. (Hence the raspberries)

I did get inspired earlier to write a bit of a "top ten shows I’ve seen" post, but really, I’ve seen so much stuff, by the time I list my top ten I’ll have thought of another 20. And so I stopped writing… (On top of which I find my site is now being ridiculously slow to the point of taking 5 minutes to load a page!)

I have to admit to being not very focused on writing at the moment. I find that between trying to do builds and video tutorials, coding, and trying to catch up on my ever-increasing emails, it’s tough to be inspired.

Frankly, I’m rather getting sick of playing with the UNIMA Aus site (mainly because getting Joomla to do even the basic stuff requires several days worth of tugging and pulling and cajoling. Never ever again will I use it) and am going to do my best to get it completed and a soft launch happening for the start of May; a few weeks after the next UNIMA Aus. committee meeting.

At which point, I’m happy to say that I shall be putting my energies towards… yeah, more coding.

Because right about then I will also have the finalised designs for both the School of Puppetry site and this one, and can get right into moving everything over. The plan is that I will move everything from the Learn Online page bit by bit; I’ll move a category or two of posts just to get things started, but then do a few posts each week. That way, I can take my time with it and go back and edit or add things where I always intended to, but never ended up doing. Plus of course, some new content as we go.

The new SOP design is a bit worrying. You see, when I got my new logo design for it, Beatriz also made up a draft design just for fun. (Well, because she wanted to really) At first I wasn’t sure about it, but I’ve found it has grown on me immensely… problem is, I’ve already got someone else working on it, but am finding myself liking their design less and less. Anyway, I’m not sure what’s happening just yet, but either way the design will be in by the end of the month. 

Luckily for me, b2evo is nothing like Joomla, and it will take me probably no more than a couple of days to implement the new design/s (Beatriz is working on a new design for PIM)….

This is my long-winded way of saying, please hang in there with me. I’m really working as fast as I can on the UNIMA site which is taking up the majority of my time at the moment. Once it has launched, I will be completely and solidly working on normal puppetry updates. In the meantime, check out my previous posts, and my latest tutorials on BlogTV.