So, it was more than time for a redesign.

This design is based on a couple of things:

Firstly: Mathew Buchanan’s genius Esquire tumblr theme. I was exploring tumblr (more on that in a minute) and came across his designs, and was more than impressed. He’s managed to explode my notions of what a blog (or tumblr) can look like. His designs are very magazine like, and driven more by classic modern graphic design than web-design – hence the drop caps (although they’re not quite working perfectly yet), and the floating elements.

Secondly: Paris (I’ve been there, you know!) by way of French Children’s books. I was thinking specifically of the colour schemes of something like Babar. Soft, friendly, sophisticated primary colours in particular: coral red, emerald green (sometimes called French green!), and French racing blue.

But more than just a pretty new design, I realized my blogging has been sorely lacking. I know, and I’m sorry. Twitter updates do not constitute a blog.

So I’ve done two things: I’ve moved twitter updates to be once weekly instead of daily (and even that, I might get rid of) so they don’t get in the way as much and I’ve signed up for a tumblr. You can find it under my name (bethmaher) if you have one too, but it’s not necessary as I will be syndicating my efforts here in an attempt to rev up my blogging.

I will always love WordPress because it makes blogging so infinitely customizable, but I will concede that tumblr is way, way easier. So combining the two is ideal: I can post big long rambling posts like this one from the admin of WP every once in a while, and the rest of the time I can be sending little brilliant little tidbits of found images, video and links from my tumblr.

As always with a redesign, I will be tweaking things for the next little while, and if you find anything that’s not working, please do give me a shout in the comments!

I’m trying to make my “tweets” work as “asides,” (mini blog posts, in other words) but I’m not sure how well it’s working (it seems to keep dropping my first tweet).

Getting married, going to Paris and getting swine flu pretty much wiped out the net proficient part of my brain I think… But I am trying to get back into it so I can massively update things around here. It’s about time, don’t you think?

It’s against all my better judgment, and I’ll probably never use it, but there it is.

Although if I ever get a phone that is capable of proper texting and internet usage, I guess it could come in handy.

As it stands though, it’s just one more password to remember.

I’ve made a few gentle upgrades to the blog – it should look a lot better in Firefox (3.0!) now. Plus I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 – and it’s pretty awesome too. Much more fun to use (of course much of the upgradiness is relegated to the back-end that I see – not the front-end that you see – so you’re just going to have to take my word on this).

I am actually up-to-date for once! We’ll see how long this lasts (likely, not very long – I am lazy when it comes to these things).

So upgrading = picture of cat. I think this is part of the ritual at this point, right? Or they kick you out of the blogosphere? Or something?

Also gentle: Piglet’s eyes. They make me cry, they are so sweet. Look at them! Weep tears of cuteness!

Ok, so here’s my official: “hey look everybody, I re-designed this baby!” post (as if you needed prompting, my lovely, lovely fans).

Like always, I’m asking you out there to beta this for me – it should be perfect on Macs running Safari or Firefox, but if you are on a Windows machine running Internet Explorer, I would especially like to hear from you because I no longer have a PC around to check these things on. If anything looks weird (not like the screenshot up there) please comment!

By the way, there is no particular inspiration for this look other than that I wanted something that was fun and summery.

The many body font should be American Typewriter. According to some website I looked at it’s on ninety-five of computers running Windows or Mac operating systems. If you don’t have American Typewriter, the typeface you’re looking at should be Courier New, which, while obviously not my ideal choice (that would be American Typewriter, duh) I feel is a nice face that is seriously underrated for uses outside of coding. At very least it gives me an approximation of the old timey typewritery feel I’m going for.

In crazy and completely unrelated news, last night I had a dream that we found a drowning Staffordshire Bull Terrier while driving along a country road. It had a collar, but it only had it’s name on it. It’s name was Rock & Roll. Is that not the most awesome name for a little bull dog, ever? Now I want a Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Rock & Roll.

Tomorrow I leave for England!

Just because I am, like, the best girlfriend ever, I just re-designed Liam’s website for him. Check it out, it’s extra pretty.

Yeah, you wish I were your girlfriend right now.

Here are my inspirations this time around:

1. the colour of a manilla envelope
2. vintage office supplies
3. Paul Smith‘s stripes
4. Get Smart
5. the Game of Life‘s logo

Sooooooo… What do you think? Of the re-design? Like what I’ve done with the place? Go ahead, Click around, check it out, you’ll find a few new things hidden here and there (hint: check out my links page, and my sidebars). Please tell me if anything is ceasing to be functional for you, or if my link colours are too bright, or if my text is not readable enough, or if my sidebar is not where it should be (to the left of the main content, by the way…).

In the meantime, here’s a few of my inspirations for that header image up there:

1. Geisha of course
2. Mamechiyo’s kimonos (especially on blythe dolls)
3. Vintage illustrations of Chinese ladies in cheongsam (sometimes known as “Shanghai girls”)
4. Miso Pretty’s take on shanghai girls – really awesome product design (hint#1: if you ever wondered what to give me as a present… hint#2: my birthday is on the eleventh…)
5. Mary Blair’s “It’s a Small World” murals in combination with her Cinderella concept designs
6. Cupcakes! Yay!

Not quite finished with that header up there (the cupcake’s really just a placeholder for now).

Whenever I get into these site overhauls I get a bit obsessed. Thankfully this time I didn’t stay up all night ultimate fighting code.

As you might be able to tell (if you’re at all familiar with these things) I used K2 which is supposed to be the best template out there for wordpress.

It’s all right. Maybe it’s the code induced exhaustion but I’m not sure I can recommend it yet. We’ll see though. It took a long time to figure out what did what. K2 allows you to override the out of the box CSS style-sheet with your own custom style without altering the original code, but I had to stick: “!important” (a CSS code that makes your code literally more important) in front of everything to get anything I wanted to stick.

There was also a lot of finicky stuff hidden away that had to be hunted down and made right.

I’ve at least got it looking the way I want it now.

Check it out!
My very first torontoist post!
Feel free to comment over there if you like it, or don’t like it, or just think indie rock pigeons making out is the most adorable thing, ever.

So I’ve officially been spammed.
Not just a little spam here and there, more like a sudden spam bomb that exploded in my comments.
It’s really not too big a deal. They spam didn’t even make it onto my web-site, because they were pretty obviously not actual human interaction. But, being previously spam free, I had my system set to moderate questionable content, so there was a moment there when my inbox was flooded with e-mails from my admin system. I implemented a handy spam blaster plug-in, and things seem to be going slightly smoother.
But I’m still not pleased.
There’s something about my own private corner of the internet being so fully assaulted that gets me all twitchy.
It doesn’t help matters that this spam was annoyingly un-generic. Every single message came from a different IP, and each message had a unique variety of links. Commercial, non-spammer links too. Telling me to visit sites I normally visit, that everybody normally visits. News sites, movie sites, just generic popular sites.
No poker, bingo, porn or Viagra.
That worries me.
I can’t figure out the purpose of it. According to Google, it doesn’t exist.
It is completely purposeless. It doesn’t sell anything.
It is spam, for spam’s sake.
What’s up with that?
It does occasionally make me pine for the days of ink ribbons.

Just got through tweaking things cosmetically around here. Just a little spring cleaning, nothing major. I may get around to more resounding changes at some point, but that’s if I have time (which unfortunately, I may just).
Although not this weekend. I still have projects on the go, not to mention a party. Oh, I’m sorry, I meant a party every night this weekend.
All the people I’ve known since I got here are getting ready to move on with their lives, and graduate already. Including Liam. The last couple of years everyone pretty much hasn’t had the time to go out and actually do stuff due to a combination of working and school. Whatever happened to the hazy, crazy Animal House days when College meant equal parts fun and study? Maybe I’m just friends with nerds. Yep, that’s entirely likely. Need to get myself some new friends or something.
Otherwise, I’m also excited that I found a guide to organic growers in my area.
“Organic?” You say.
Yep. I’ve been looking for where to find heirloom vegetables like funky purple potatoes, and black tomatoes and all manner of all natural, but completely unnatural looking vegetables, so I’m not some gigantic hippy freak (although I do have tendencies…). I thought you could only find that stuff in big cities despite the fact that I live in one of the most fertile growing regions in the country, and I’m sure a lot of organic food is grown right here. Turns out I was wrong, and it makes me happy, ’cause now I know where to find home-made preserves and heirloom apples.
I’m also totally gonna have to check out the Pelham farmers market. It looks like the place to be come May (which is in 3 days, awesome).

Aaaaand done. Finally. Bethmaher.com is up and running. I am realising I am a perfectionist. I have redesigned and re-done everything here, and I’ve only owned the domain for a couple weeks. I even tested it in 4 separate browsers, on 2 different operating systems (explorer for Mac still has some kinks, but I don’t feel like fixing them yet, because who in their right mind would be running explorer on a Mac anyways). I coded and re-coded until I couldn’t stand to see another line of code. If some nerd comes to tell me that my site is not up to snuff, or web standards or some kind of nonsense, I will have to remind them that Enterprise has been cancelled. No more sexy Vulcans for them (note to self: still need to make favicon and 404 page – damnit, like I’m not going to miss the sexy Vulcan myself).
I am super happy with the little me you see in the header up there though.
Bunny hat! Super cute!

The de rigueur posting of my cat Kaylee seems like an appropriate place to start. If youre into irony, I guess..

Awww… Ain’t she cute? We’ve only had her two weeks, and now that she’s eating (had a stressed-out anorexic moment there) she’s a delight. When she isn’t whining. Yep, she’s a teenage livejournal user stuck in the body of the cutest cat in the world.