Still In Recovery

I have been spending a great deal of time recovering from 2 things… a physical ailment where I actually tore something within my inner hip/pelvis region when I tripped over a “safety guard” while working the freight at Kohl’s, and the second being that I still have not reinstated all of my online properties after my high speed web hosting reseller account (which was so expensive that I couldn’t resell it) was finally cancelled on February 14th of this year.

The Injury:

Although I had recovered well and felt good when I went back to work after over a week off and taking Advil every day, soon after the tolls of the graveyard shift and the constant physical labor of unloading and replenishing freight was wearing on me.  I plan on going back to see the doctor because now my hip makes popping or clicking sounds in my normal day-to-day routine when I’m not working.  This is often accompanied with a shooting pain, but sometimes it is more noise. But I still haven’t recovered from taking the one week off after I had the injury.  I am really hurting financially because work was already slow and my domain/hosting sales also slow-up in the summer. I admit I am feeling pretty frail now, these days.

The Websites:

Only a handful of websites remain offline currently, these are mostly my general subject directories.  One that remains up and online (after recovering it) is Hyperlink Directory.  Because of complications with the databases of other directories, I will be using the Hyperlink Directory database to form the start of my other directories which were previously phpLinkDirectories (Worthful Index & Reciprocate Links!, which are currently parked until I have some extra time to get them online).

Some of the other directories I ran seemed to be running on what might be considered insecure directory software, so I am leaving those offline until I can find a migration path.  Since phpLD doesn’t support directory database migration, I am looking to other software solutions.

In the meantime, I have not only continued recovering the websites and intellectual properties that went down in flames due to my expensive web hosting issues, I’ve also been making those recovered websites better, as well as continuing to build my empire of websites and brands. One example is that I setup Font-Journal on Domain Hostmaster hosting and I am also trying to keep it updated as I have a whole bunch more fonts to upload (the list is quite long).

I also setup Glossary Index, which is a handy little dictionary word lookup utility site with live feedback as you type in your word.

I have established a couple more pin-up beauty sites honoring and celebrating the unsurpassed beauty of women. These are both on Tumblr, Top Hot Girls seems the most popular. I don’t know if it is the monochromatic style or simply that I have been lucky to find some shots of very precious beauties in this format, but Super Elegance is one of my favorites. To me the beauty of women is undeniable proof of God.  You can’t tell me that there isn’t a superior intelligence at work there, they are pure living art.  I just wish they made sense.  And there you have God’s humor making our lives interesting.

I also setup a domain to display my old HTML Character Code Reference Table at (where else?) HTMLCharacterCode.com.

I am working on a few other new sites and updating some elder ones, as well.  Right now I am trying to setup sites using best web design practices that take advantage of the HTML5 & CSS3 web standards.  This is proving to a be a lot more difficult using CSS to structure the layout.  Although I love the standard, it is a great deal more difficult to code this way.  It is also harder to struggle through the code when designing radically different sites, as I always have to start over from scratch.

The worst part is that while I am trying to get all my old sites updated with HTML5 and CSS3, I am not learning all the neat things that I can do in HTML5 with the canvas property that I need to know.

I feel like I’m always racing to catch-up.  My part-time job doesn’t exactly help me accomplish a single thing, either.  It’s a very physical job moving freight all night long and always wears me out and takes me out of the game for well too long recuperating afterwards.

Why even have this stupid menial labor position, I don’t know, I am farther in debt now than when I started a year ago.  WTF?

Adding Your Favorite Links to Your Windows Explorer Menu

I am sure someone else has figured this out long ago and its probably common knowledge among geeks, but I am happy to report that I finally figured out how to customize Windows Explorer with your favorite shortcuts (in Windows Vista or 7).

While I was tooling around the directory structure, trying to figure out where I had last saved some graphics that are still hidden away from my view.  I stopped in my user’s folder that is often refused to as “Libraries” and I noticed that there was a “Favorites” folder and a “Links” folder.  I thought, why would there be two?  I knew the “Favorites” folder is where my internet shortcuts are saved, but why was there a “Links” folder, which is exactly what I would’ve called it in the first place.  So on a hunch, I placed a couple extra shortcuts in the “Links” folder I had just discovered and walla, they showed-up in Windows Explorer (the file explorer, not internet explorer).

I’m so proud of myself.  😉  It really helps out, having all your most often traveled destinations in there ready-to-click and send you exactly where you want to go, under the “Favorite Links” column.

So now anyone can add their favorite directory destinations in the “Links” folder (found within the “Users” folder bearing your user log-in name on the computer) as shortcuts, and then your shortcuts will appear in the “Favorite Links” column of Explorer anytime you open the “Computer”, “Documents” or any other directory.

Cool.

Do You Need Like-Minded People to Follow on Twitter?

Are you looking for some like minded people to follow on Twitter?  If so, you may have been following people that your friends have been following, trusting their judgment.  But this has not worked out well for me.  Often it works very well, but there are the few trouble makers with a crappy mouth that I do not like my son to see.  Since TweetDeck is updating at regular intervals automatically, this is a big problem.

But recently Twitter has introduced “lists”.  Lists allow you to categorize other twitterers (or “tweople”) into lists.  In my case, I have categorized a whole mess of people into quite a few lists.  This should allow some of you who are designers to follow other designers, and etc.

A list of my current lists, with links to them, follows:

@Domainating/authors
@Domainating/entrepreneurs
@Domainating/marketers
@Domainating/artists
@Domainating/sports
@Domainating/tools
@Domainating/directories
@Domainating/siouxfalls
@Domainating/seoers
@Domainating/resources
@Domainating/southdakota
@Domainating/developers
@Domainating/designers
@Domainating/domainers

Hopefully that’s a good place to start, anyway. I actually spent quite a bit of time building those lists. I hope you can enjoy a few of them.

These lists are meant to allow others an easy means to follow other like-minded professionals, but you don’t have to actually follow each member, individually.  From what I understand, Twitter allows you to follow each individual list, making it much easier to add everyone listed there.

However, remember that you don’t have to follow anyone in order to put them in your own list, either.  That is, I started a list of designers and added all the known/recognized graphic and web designers to it.  But I didn’t actually follow the guys who’s Twitter posts (“tweets”) weren’t in English.  I still want them in my list in case I need someone who speaks Polish better than I (or some other language), so that I have easy access to them should I need to contract a freelancer on a project.

I do suggest that you follow like-minded people, though.  For instance, if you don’t know anything about domain names, and don’t especially want to, don’t go through the list of Domainers.  You’ll only get a bunch of info you don’t really want to know, such as domain name news, domain names offered for sale, or maybe something like how to use Google AdSense to monetize your website.  Professional websites don’t show Google AdWords advertisements, after all.

Happy Tweeting!