Just in case you think I’ve disappeared: I haven’t. After the UNIMA Australia launch I got kind of swamped with requests, feedback, and problems to sort out. Although they’ve been minor and not too time-consuming, it has left me sick of looking at my computer. Yesterday I spent the whole day doing nothing, just as a break from it all.

In the meantime, today I tried to get some other things done. I’m still struggling with RSS for combining PIM and SOP together; apologies for any issues there to my RSS readers, I’ve been fiddling and it might have caused some issues with posts reappearing in your feeds.

But I’ve also finished my entry for Stacey Gordon’s (Staceyrebecca) puppet competition. You may recall I had a choc chip cookie finger puppet of hers and was going to enter a pic. Well, I sucked it up and sent in the pics that I wasn’t happy with. They’re not bad, just not terribly amazing.

In a totally selfish move, I thought to myself - “I’m advertising Stacey’s puppets for free. Seems silly not to get in on the action myself". From there, it was a hop, step and jump to coming up with the idea of one of my puppets attacking hers. And my mind, always loving the idea of subtle layers of contextualisation, came up with an even better idea: a shadow puppet version of the finger puppet. Eating the finger puppet. 

I know I’m not one for ‘replicas’ or ’spoofs’ in this case, so I wanted to check with Stacey before submitting them. Normally I wouldn’t even come close to doing a recreation of someone else’s puppet, but once I got the idea in my head, I knew I had to at least try it and see.

You can see all the other entries (so far) including mine here, personally I don’t think - with the quality of my photos especially - I have any chance of beating the Puppet Western Bar. That’s so very cute! I have three entries, each one slightly different. One you see above, another without the ‘eek!’, and the third is simply the shadow puppet towering over a scared finger puppet. You can see the quality of the photos aren’t that great, but hey, I tried.

Do go and vote on the entries, Stacey will be taking into account public response to the photos. More info about voting and deadlines is given at Stacey’s blog, linked above.

I have just completed the public launch of the UNIMA Australia website. I’ve not had a chance to write anything decent today on puppetry (yes, I know, yet again! ) but with pretty good cause. Last night I toughed out as much of the fixes as possible, only getting to sleep around midday today. I awoke late afternoon and have spent the time since going through the last-minute stuff that could… well, only be done last minute.

Feel free to head to the site and have a look. Technically the launch is sometime ‘today’ (22nd June), but I actually have a committee meeting at 10am and wanted to have everything done before then.

If you’re curious, you can read a blog post I just added to the UNIMA Aus. site which shows just how much of a change it all really is (and why it’s taken me so long to do), with side-by-side comparison screen dumps of the old versus the new. Or you could check out my UNIMA Aus. profile page. Or see if you can spot anything familiar on the site’s new gallery page… Either way, you browse, I eat. And sleep for a few hours.

I’m done.

In a trifecta of bad luck, I’ve spent the weekend mangling things. My idea for Stacey’s competition came out relatively well, but as usual I’ve stuffed up in the process. (I can’t give away much, but it was a minor screw up). Taking photos was worse though, in that I’ve broken my fluoro light that I use for shadow puppets. It still works, but the glass of the tube has broken and there is something rattling around in it (not the glass, since it’s a small break, more like a chip), so it’s making me think that it’s probably not safe to work with anymore. And finally… well, the idea didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. It’s just… missing something…

Next, I’ve spent a number of hours trying to find some way of combining two RSS feeds together (SOP and PIM into one so people who are currently getting the PIM feed don’t miss out when the content is split off into two places), but that apparently is easier than it sounds. There’s a number of services out there that do it - unfortunately none of them Feedburner, which is what I use for my feed - but none of them seem to update correctly. Or at all.

And finally, Tuesday being the public launch of the UNIMA Australia site, I’ve had to spend some time redoing one whole page, due to a hackable code. I’ve known about the security flaws for a while now, but had hoped that a fix would come through by now. It hasn’t, and probably won’t. But as usual with all things Joomla, nothing’s that easy. Finding a new plugin to replace the old is like hoping for a one-legged tripod. Doesn’t really exist. I’ve finally tracked down something that works, but again, nothing is that simple. It doesn’t work out of the box, which seems typical of Joomla crap. Sigh… I’ll be fiddling around with this stuff all day too, because the committee meeting for UNIMA that was supposed to happen last week was moved to… yep, Tuesday. I’m hoping to push through as much of the last-minute edits as possible, with the idea to press the ‘launch’ button Monday night/early morning of Tues.

I’d love it if things could work properly for once. That’d be nice. (I get the feeling I spend a lot of time complaining on this blog )

Yet another day where there’s nothing done… I’ve been a bit behind - partly because of the SOP site design, but also because my sleep cycle has kind of flipped around. I’m now sleeping during the day, and working at night. It’s easier because the day is quiet. Yeah, if that makes sense to you… well, you’re one up on me.

Anyway, I’ve also been spending some time away from the computer. Stacey Gordon is running a photo competition for her puppets - and since I bought a choc chip cookie finger puppet from her last year at the National Puppetry Festival I thought I’d enter. I’d already seen an entry, and knew the competition would be fierce. So I’ve come up with a pretty neat idea - no hints! - but it’s taking longer than I thought. I hope to finish it over the weekend, but I won’t post it on the site until I’ve sent the pic to Stacey. There’s a detail or two I want to confirm with her first.

I can say though, that I’m liking what I’ve come up with, and I’ll be spending a lot of time getting some good shots. Here’s Stacey’s promo pic for the puppet; that’ll give you an idea as to what I’m working with.

To be honest, it’s kind of nice to sit down and work on something artistic that’s not going to be sold to anyone. It’s also a good mental break from coding, which is doing my head in. (The links page on SOP is still giving me problems. I just can’t get a two column template to work, and allow the links to show grouped by category. I’m working on a solution at the moment, but it’s not quite right and very buggy)

If I have this photo done by the end of tomorrow night, I’ll post it over the weekend.