I’m just not that into you.

We’ve been together for these 34 years, 11 months, 2 weeks and 12 days, even though I didn’t know about you for the first 15 years. I thought you had something to do with the little hole just north of you until one day when I was trying to convince my mother to let me use this AMAZING BRAND NEW INVENTION called a tampon, and I pitched it to her as, “If you can get a baby out of that tiny little opening, I’d think getting a little tube of cotton up there would be a no brainer.”

Her falling over and dying of laughter-induced asphyxiation was my first clue that I was missing something key. And yes, I went through two whole menstrual years before I knew you existed. Cult. Schizophrenic. You try to fair better in life.

Anyway, I figured out what the hell you were four years later soon enough, and sure, you’ve done great things for me. You allowed me to wring out three humans so they could breath well enough to eat all my good cookies someday, and you’ve single-handedly kept this guy around for the better part of 14 years. It’s not like he’s still here because of my mad housekeeping skillz or anything.

All I’m saying is that I get it. You’re important. So is astro-physics but you don’t see me sticking my hands in that gooepy hot mess, either, do you? I’m happy letting you be you, and letting me be me, and calling it a day. You’re a glorified tube sock, a protein depository, and to be perfectly honest…you kind of wigg me the fuck out.

I have never been the ‘I have vagina; hear me roar!’ kind of women. I never felt the need to sit on a mirror to explore the source of my power and femininity. I made my father videotape the births of my children from the neighboring hospital. I got pregnant with my first kid because I couldn’t find my diaphragm and figured I was digesting it. I don’t care how you work…I just care that you do. The source of MY power and femininity? DSW. It’s not oozey. I don’t have to wax it. The worst thing anyone leaves behind in DSW is congealing white chocolate mochas. Which are still pretty fucking delicious.

But still, I decided to let you try one of those Diva Cup things. Because I am an idiot.

Our midwife had warned us that things like this would be a problem when she tried to reach my cervix and realized that holy shit you’re long and had to take a running start to get her fingers all the way to the top of you. Good times, good times. I don’t have the luxury of taking running starts to get weapons of mass absorption in their proper place. All I have are 10 stubby fingers that would rather dig around the insides of a rotting wildebeest carcass than try to get a plastic Barbie funnel in it’s proper place. And yet, I tried. For you.

It’s not degrading enough that I can put a 4.3 cm plastic shotglass in you and not feel it, oh no. You had to go and an attention whore about the whole thing. You had to keep pushing that thing back out. You had to shift it sideways. You had to make me spend every 47.28 minutes with my entire hand up in you (which seriously, I could have gone my whole life not knowing I can get a whole hand in you, thanks for that gem of an ego boost) adjusting and re-adjusting that thing while I was on vacation with my entire family AND 10 other bloggers. AT A WATERPARK. Are you trying to tell me something? Not getting enough attention? Take it up with your co-owner; that’s in his job-description, not mine.

And don’t for a second tell me I was doing it wrong. Want I should make a list of all the random crap I’ve had to stick in you over the past 22 years? I didn’t think so. I’m the World’s Leading Authority in the field of wedging plastic contraptions in you to keep stuff in, or out. And I’m done. I’m over you. I’m buying a Red Tent and we are spending 7-9 days of every month in it, end of story.

You have failed me for the last time.

Your Lovin’,

Mr Lady

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : Surviving Parenting. Kinda.. All Rights Reserved. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.

You think my blog is bland? You should see my house. Every time Tanis comes to visit, she tries to take me fabric shopping. I’m a simple girl with simple needs. I like neutrals. I am boring. My blog is the absolute perfect representation of the person that I am….pasty white, with a little orange zest.

I think this is because my home growing up looked like a stoned clown had thrown up in it. We were the victims of circumstance. We only had that which we were given, which was an old leather pull-out sofa, an excessively large Sesame Street throw blanket, a block of burnt orange shag carpet and two player pianos.  For the record, if you’re giving an impoverished family of 5 a player piano, good on ya. Music is the great equalizer. Also give them some fucking crackers.

After the jump, we’re talking about the functionality of design in your blog. If you are quite happy with the design of your blog already, or if you have better things to do with your life than keep a blog, might I offer you some of the best damn* political writing I’ve seen to date this fine Friday? Otherwise, take your seats and get your pencils ready after the jump….

The first thing I’m going to say about designing your blog is don’t. Unless you are a graphic designer, of websites, there’s just too much you don’t know. Trying to hack your CSS (cascading style sheets) and move this or change that can and probably will completely fubar the functionality of your template. Example: When I was on Blogspot, I decided to go with wide margins. I built myself a nifty little top-horizontal navigation bar (which, to my credit, worked lusciously)  and I expanded my margins to achieve the exact look I was going for…a wiiiiide posting area with one slim sidebar. It was beautiful. I loved it. Two full years later, I looked at it on another, newer computer, and realized my sleek little Virginia Slim sidebar that I had custom coded to do all kinds of awesome shit had been showing up in everyone’s monitor smooshed into the footer of my blog. Why? Because I had no fucking clue what I was doing.

You don’t have to pay through the teeth for a template. Sure, there are loads of big, expensive design companies that will charge you your left nut for a template, but there are also loads of bloggers who are looking to make an extra little income who will, and can, design you a perfectly lovely template that meets your needs and wants, and won’t reflect the “design company’s” trademark. Judith Shakespeare is my personal favorite…she’s versatile (look at the difference between my blog and Redneck Mommy’s. You’d never guess they came from the same hands), she’s inexpensive, and she’s a gem to work with. Temptation Designs does great work (see Blog Nosh, Maggie Dammit, Craftastrophe). Sweet Blog Designs is also very good, and will happily just design your twitter page (see We Covet and MamaPop). There are tons of other bloggers who will help you, too…ones who know enough not to totally fuck your blog up, but one’s who are doing this for fun, so they aren’t going to charge you much. I think Zoeyjane likes to dabble in design. I know there are more. The thing is, they’re all bloggers. Using them is giving back to our community. I’m all for buying crap that I need from bloggers whenever I get the chance.

Also, and just as an aside, sometimes getting the perspective of you from someone that isn’t can be a good thing. Like that bottle I used to have? I had not ONE thing to do with that. Judith came up with that all on her own, and it was the single greatest idea anyone’s ever had in the history of ideas. I think we all would say without hesitation that her bottle was better than anything I could have come up with on my own.

Sometimes, people will give away templates for free. Like Erica M, who has a free Woo Themes Premium template to give away, just for you sweet readers o’mine. Just leave a comment on her post to enter. No Twitter retweet insanity or post-this-on-your-own blog crap required to enter. It’s just the theme; you’ll have to personalize it on your own, but a premium theme really is a great way to increase your blog’s functionality and SEOity, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The most important thing to remember when designing your blog is that every little element works together. Moving A changes B. Altering X affects Y. All this coding crap is like the Borg, and if you fuck with one Borg, The Collective comes calling to kick your ass. THERE IS NO ONE BORG. You have to tread lightly.

If you use Squarespace or free Wordpress, you can’t screw too much up, really. There are ways, but it’s unlikely that you’re going to ruin your template. They’re kind of rookie-proof. If you use Blogger, you stand a better chance of falling victim to the sort of sidebar debacle I found myself in for a few years, but someone will tell you, and Blogger has a lovely little reset button to start you back at square one.

Melanie had asked about uploading new templates and widening columns in Blogger, so here’s the short answer. Which isn’t very short:

To widen a column, you have to find out what width you have to work with. Your template’s HTML is going to at least tell you how wide your blog is total and how wide your sidebars are. Then you know what you have to work with, but you have to factor in margins and padding and shit. If you have something like these (click to make’m bigger):

Then you know that you have a total of 950 px to work with, and 210 of them are currently begin used for your sidebar. Most post-area widths run around 450-550. If your HTML doesn’t straight up tell you what your “body” px are, then you can adjust your sidebar px, and it will automatically adjust the rest to fit. Anything under 160 px for a sidebar is useless; just sayin. If you want a big fat sidebar, like one that will house one of those big, square ads like I have on top, you need 300px just for the ad, and a little extra for margins and padding. Mine is set to 360 px total.

To upload a new template to blogger, you just have to find the one you like and download it. Copy the code the download will spit out at you and paste it over whatever lives in the Edit HTML box in your dashboard. Voila! New template.

You can add all sorts of plugins that make your comments thread or add those oddly redundant signatures at the bottom of your posts or change your post titles from normal old fonts to typewriter print or swirly cursive, but any decent designer can build all of that into the functionality of your blog, which won’t slow your page down like a plug-in will. Your blog design should reflect your personality, like your calling card for the modern age. It should reflect what you’re trying to do online, whether that be highlighting your great photographs or selling wares or just rambling on and on without point for years on end. Not like I know anything about that. There are shit-tons of design options and ideas out there, and finding the right one for you takes time, a whole lot of thought and probably a little guidance.

In closing, you know, if you’ve skimmed this and just want it to be over: I am not a graphic designer. I am also not a licensed hairstylist or auto-mechanic. I will change my own oil on occasion and I have been know to throw some highlights in my hair from time to time, but like engine work or hair cuts or decent blow jobs, I believe that some things should just be left to professionals. If you’re adding a nice little personalized header image to your blog, have at it. It you want your blog to be stylish and functional enough to make people’s time in your space easy and pleasant, get professional help.

I’m pretty sure that each one of us who considers a string of code propagated through invisible wires “our space” is in need of all the professional help we can get.

*misguided political writing. But painfully well-written all the same.

Reminder (or The Point for those of you smart enough to not attempt reading my bullshit, enter for a free Premium Wordpress theme on Erica M’s site, not here.)

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : Surviving Parenting. Kinda.. All Rights Reserved. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.

Truth is, this isn’t unlike most days, except the “fun” is normally the “grocery store”. Well, that and the hair brushing. I try to pick my battles.

I have ridiculously cute children, and I won’t for a second play all modest like I don’t think they are the most amazingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful things to ever grace this planet. I’ve often toyed with the idea of getting them into actual, real modeling, and I’ve gone so far as to ask a friend who knows about this stuff for advice on how to do it. But the thing is, I’m lazy. And I think my kids should get to be, too. And I worry about making them self-conscious about their looks, especially on the cusp of the ugly years.

No child goes through puberty gracefully. Fact. Why do you think the bible stops at Jesus’ adolescence and picks back up in his 30’s? Zits and oddly dispersed facial hair; no one is immune. Not even someone who thinks they’re god.

So for now, I stick with the modeling that helps my friends out, that gets my daughter some stupidly cute outfits, and that lets me dabble in the one and only field of subjects that I am capable of taking decent pictures of. I’m no Secret Agent Mama, but I can take a mean picture of my kids when I have to.

Except when I screw my camera’s setting up.

A new dress arrived last week for 3of3 to trounce around in, and this time we actually prepped for some cuteness. I harnessed my inner pageant-mom and subjected my daughter to unspeakable tortures in the name of fashion.

But it’s not like I’m asking her to do anything I wouldn’t do myself, so there’s that.

And once she was all poofy, we went out. Normally, I have ridiculously good luck with her pictures. They just fall into place, even when I’m using a point and click camera.

Not this time. This time I took 250 pictures and she fed every duck south west of the Mississippi, even the dead one, which didn’t bother her at all but bothered me a great big fat deal, and not one picture is usable. Because I never read the manual for my camera. I assumed the DSLR just ran on pride or something.

So now I get to learn how to fix whatever settings I’ve wacked out on my camera, and then we get to go feed more aminals today. Live ones, preferably. And though there aren’t any pictures good enough for my buddy’s spring campaign, with enough time and Picnik, there are a hell of a lot of pictures for her baby book.

This blog is her so totally her baby book. Shut up; you do it, too.

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : Surviving Parenting. Kinda.. All Rights Reserved. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.

I was born 15 minutes off the cusp of Pisces and Aries, so I’m about as close to both as you can get without having an evil twin growing out of your throat. This just means that I get both of my kids pretty well. This also means that we all have birthdays in the next 44 days; just sayin’.

*ahem*

The differences in my children make my life totally complete, absolutely fascinating, and consistently inconsistent. They need two totally different styles of discipline, affection, encouragement and socialization. My oldest son can (and does) get lost in design and programming and science. My youngest son needs people. He needs physical interaction just to maintain his sanity. He needs friendships and he needs love.

Conveniently enough, he found both this weekend.

He’s been fairly epically in love twice before, which is saying something since the kid hasn’t been alive for an entire decade just yet. His first One True Love was Sam. They were five and she taught him how to french kiss on the playground at school one day. She was a troubled little girl from a troubled little home and he was, well, him, and those waters run deep. They were soulmates, best friends, two halves of a whole and he still refers to her as the great love of his life, four whole years later.

The second girl was Natalie. Natalie looked almost exactly like Sam, but didn’t have the troubled-childhood thing under her belt. She was older than him, popular, athletic and smart. She was the girl that every little boy wanted to have the attention of, but my son was determined to win her over. We talked a lot about how to treat a girl, how to win her heart, and he agreed that it would be best if he was just nice to her. He went out of his way to include her in their playground games, but didn’t treat her like “a girl”….he just played with her, like she was every other kid. He didn’t nag her, but he didn’t ignore her, either, and he didn’t tease her like most of his friends did. And then one day, once the groundwork was laid and she knew who he was, he wrote her a private letter. He told her that looking at her was like looking at angels, and that when she was near him, it was as if he was in heaven.

The boy’s good, yo.

Aside: I only know about this letter because he left it at his friend’s house and that friend’s mom found it. It was so adorable, she actually hand-delivered it to Ms Natalie. After she called me to read it to me.

But then we moved, again, and 2of3 has been reluctant to make new friends here. You move a kid far enough away from everything he loves enough times, and he starts sheltering his heart.

He’s got a few buddies here; not anyone close enough to get into really good trouble with, but just enough to have a kid or two to eat lunch with. 2of3 is the kind of kid who needs one person, just one, that is all his own. He needs that soul-crushing, all-consuming connection with someone, and without it, he’s just not the same kid. Which sucks, because he’s manically awesome when he’s whole.

When we had some friends over for dinner on Saturday, we assumed their daughters would be friends with our daughter. She’s 4, they are 6 and 7. We figured our 11 year old would lock his door and hide in his room the whole night, and we figured that 2of3 would spend the night showing the grown-ups how far he can shove his fingers up his nose while the girls all played together.

Wrong.

By the end of the night, their 7 year old and my 9 year old were in a tent out back with a flashlight, a board game and some popcorn, just hanging out. They played video games together and played tag with each other and had juice boxes together.  They met, they wooed, they made exchange of video game cheat codes.

He absolutely adored her. Admittedly, she IS pretty flipping adorable, but after they headed home for the night, I went up to the boys rooms to send them to bed. I found 2of3 on his brother’s floor, slowly and deliberately pushing a little skateboard up and down a little Tech Deck ramp, and I asked him if he had fun. He sighed. I asked him if we should invite the girls to his birthday party, and he didn’t even look up at me when he said, “Mom, I think I have a crush on her.” I said I thought he did, too, and he said, “But she’s only seven. I’m going to have to be really nice to her, huh?”

Yes, kid, yes you are. I have a feeling it won’t be all that hard for you to pull really nice off, though.

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : Surviving Parenting. Kinda.. All Rights Reserved. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.

Anyway, FTP. If you use a hosted blog platform like Blogger or Squarespace, you will never have to worry about this science-fiction double-feature. Go read something interesting {may I recommend some Polite Fiction?} and have a happy Friday. If you’re a slave to the Wordpress, or other fun platforms that make you upload shit to your server just to function, please join class after the jump to learn how to survive the claw-handed, backwards clothes wearing, wiggedy-wiggedy-wiggedy wack nightmare that is FTP…..

There are two basic elements that makes your blog go zoom zoom, HTML and PHP. HTML is what makes your blog look the way it looks. Your stylesheet, those fonts and colors and shit, that’s HTML. HTML is the walk-in closet of your blog. PHP is the nerve system. It’s how your blog’s heart beats without you telling it to. It’s how you don’t have to think ‘kick’, it just kicks.

Your history lesson for the day: Some dude in Greenland created the first PHP code for his personal home page (see, Personal Home Page? Clever boy) in 1994. He created the second one, too, and that one could talk to databases. Hence, the dynamic webpage was born. And then a couple of Israeli dudes tweeked Rasmus’ code a bit, and you have PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor today.

That’s the really short story.

Basically, PHP takes input from a file or stream containing text and/or PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data, which is usually HTML. And you blog goes. That’s all you really need to know….it makes your blog go, until you fuck it up royally. And you WILL fuck it up royally, given the chance.

You don’t really need to know how it works, because God gave us FTP clients and programmers give us handy little zipped filed containing Comment Luv plugins and complete blogging templates and twitter feeders that are all properly written. All you have to do is find the program you want to run on your blog, unzip it, and use your FTP client to upload it to your server. Voila! It works. Wordpress now even lets you search for the plugin you want, click install, and wait 5 seconds. No unzipping or uploading required.

This could take a very porny turn any second now; yes, I am aware.

The only thing you really need to know is how to login to your FTP client and access your server.

Your server is where everything your blog needs to run and be read is housed. Every post, every font color, every little last thing sits on a server. That’s what you pay for….server space. It’s the Public Storage of the Internet, complete with the pickled heads of cross-dressing psych patients.

But I’m digressing. We’ll get to servers and storage space and decapitation of your blog another day.

If you self host, you have an FTP login. There are several different ways to access your FTP. When I was on PC, I used FileZilla. Now that I’m on Mac, I use Classic FTP. These let you find something you want to use in your blog…say, some plugin, on your computer and with one slide of a mouse, upload them to your blog’s server. The file you’ve chosen then just runs with the rest of your blog, because they’re written to, and you have some new template or function.

Or you know, you could use it to share song files between friends, without all that hairy email uploading wait time.

If I gave Vodkapundit the keys to my FTP*, he could log in, open that music folder, click Camper Van Beethoven, and slide it right into his own music folder. THAT’S how FTP works.

I tell you all of this to tell you how to use FTP when you see something like THIS:

If you see that pop up when you open your blog, you’re fucked. Or, better put you’ve fucked something up. These Syntax and Parsing Errors seem to be as contagious as a yawn or herpes…one person gets them, everyone seems to get them.

If @Jim can break his blog, you can break your blog. And you will. Resistance is futile. What isn’t futile is learning how to fix it.

What I’d done to garner the affections of the White Screen of Doom is try to insert some stupid, funny only to me, message into my blog for when your comment gets held in moderation. I’ve gotten that screen before, trying to add plugins or trying to customize my comment box. What I forget sometimes it that blogs are like scarves. They’re knit together. Just because I find one line in my php that handles comment moderation, that doesn’t mean there aren’t 10 other lines of code that work with it, and if I only edit one of them, the whole thing unravels. I unraveled my blog.

And once you get the white screen of death, you can’t do shit. You can’t get into your dashboard, you can’t see your blog, nothing. You. Are. Screwed. Even if you know *exactly* where you made your mistake, you can’t undo it. You have to go into your server, by means of your FTP, and fix it there.

This is scarier than all the Freddy Kreugars combined. But you can do it.

When you see that SYNTAX ERROR glaring at you where your dearly beloved blog should be, the natural reaction is to freak the fuck out. Once you uncurl your body from the fetal position it reverts to underneath your desk, the first thing you need to do it READ.

That error message tells you everything you need to know to undo your wrongs. You just have to follow along with it’s instructions. Mine told me that my problem was in:

So now, all you have to do is re-read all that stuff up there that I explained and you skimmed over, then log in to your FTP and on click each of those folders in the order it tells you. Once you get to Functions, it’s going to pop out that Functions code. You then count 20 lines down and there you are, at what you need to fix.

You have to use the left-pointing arrow to download that popped-out sheet to your computer, then you change your mistake to what it should be, save it, click that right arrow and upload it back to your functions folder.

It sounds complicated, but it’s not. I mean, I did it, and I’m kind of an idiot. Class dismissed. And what the hell should we cover next Friday?

*Stephen has been trying for years to get the keys to my, um, errr…FTP. Fat chance, buster.

©2010 Whiskey in My Sippy Cup : Surviving Parenting. Kinda.. All Rights Reserved. I will seriously hunt you down and spank your ass if you scrape my site. Not the good spanking, either.