Six Years Later

By Aneesah, 24 Aug 10

Hiya! Welcome to Aneesah-Hideaway.Net. Haha. Same blog, same person, different address, yadda yadda.  😛 For those who don’t know, aneesah.pixelled.com has existed since August 2004, very kindly hosted by Nile when pixelled.com was a free hosting site. I am still hosted by her but at Host Solutions, and since the package comes with a domain (I’ve dreamed of getting my own domain years ago, when personal sites were all the rage), I quickly racked my brain for a name (aneesah.com and .net are taken, aneesahshideaway.com is too long and a bit awkward, and aneesah-hideaway.net seemed to look a bit more proper compared to aneesah-hideaway.com — it has to do with the e‘s, I think. ^^; ) The site will remain the same as the old one, except for (hopefully) an increase in the frequency of blog entries. Do I sound like a broken record, yet? :B Oh, one thing about getting your own domain, aside from the site address, is an e-mail address — my new one is me[at]aneesah-hideaway[dot]net. Is that not the coolest thing ever? :clap: *dork*

In real life news, I am still on summer holiday with my summer job, but it is my last week on the job [insert pretend cry –> 😥 here] and I’ll have a bit more free time after this, hopefully. 😀 The truth is, I did not have internet access at home for about a month and a half.  o_O Crazy, eh? Nobody expected the landline and broadband setups to take so long, really. We’ve been avid library-visitors all this while, just to use the student PCs after work at the uni. But of course public computers are never as fun (can’t even install software or anything), so you can imagine our torture. :nod: Although, on the other hand, I discovered that you could indeed survive without the ability to know when a new e-mail comes in, or checking on Facebook every other minute. But really, being in our generation, I have to say a computer without an internet connection is fairly useless. What, no Google Maps, no checking on currency rates, no listening to new music, nothing new to watch (unless you have a TV, of course), no Googling for recipes (cookbooks? Who buys those anymore? :T ), no video-calling, nothing! X(

At home, free time was filled with lots of movies, cooking/eating, and books. I did not make reading much of a hobby for years — since teenhood, in fact — and I’ve forgotten how much I like it. The whole “traveling” and experiencing and feeling enormously enlightened, by just sitting there and reading. I mainly borrowed books from my housemates, but did you know you could also download free classics online? 😀 (I shall not mention any illegal options here.) ‘Tis pretty nice, although with a clunky laptop you could hardly carry your reading around with you or slouch in awkward positions while lost in another world. I guess that’s why there’s all the rage with iPads and iPhones and e-book readers…

Anyway. I never managed to blog about this “new” blog theme, so I’ll do that now. I started designing a layout draft on Photoshop ages ago (I don’t even remember when), till I got stuck (read: lazy) and it remained something like this:

The plaid pattern I already had in my hard drive (I used to save images from stock photo DVDs and things like that), and plaid was very “in” last autumn/winter. In fashion, I mean. Literally plaid (also called tartan?) cotton shirts that girls wore with leggings or jeggings or whatever else they call it now. The header I was clueless about. At that time I suppose I was going into more of a craft-theme and thought maybe fabric yo-yo’s could fit in somehow. What finally inspired the theme you see now were scans of a sling bag I had (and coloured with fabric markers) — I don’t know what prompted me to scan the flower pattern, but I did and then managed to Photoshop it around and ta-da. ^_^ The header font is called No Mystery.

The coding bit of the layout took some more time because I wanted to use an existing WordPress theme (I had not bothered to keep up with WP updates so my ancient theme didn’t have the new functionalities — eg. Widgets — of present themes). Searching around led me to Exciter, which fulfilled my layout criteria of single-column with a footer, with the addition of one cool factor — that javascript “top” link that magically scrolls you to the top of the page. :boogie: I probably spent the most time on the CSS roll-over navigation up in the header. It is an old technique, I suppose, that I’ve used before, and learnt from this A List Apart article.

Okay I think that’s enough jargon for one entry. I’ll blog again for crafty things and fun stuff. Shorter posts might be a good thing after all, yes? 🙂 Later ‘gators!