It has taken me a full day, lots of reading of hints and how-tos and quite a few misunderstandings and "smash forehead against keyboard to continue" - but it seems I have now managed to get the shop website bilingual.

Don't do the happy dance yet, though - there's not all the translated data put into the shop system yet, so if you go there now, you will find a warning that it may not be fully functional (though I hope it will function) and quite a few entries of wares with no text at all in the English version.

And since I ran out of time before packing up for Tannenberg, this will stay like this until middle of next week or so - when I will be back and do things with it again.

There you go. One English webshop, coming right up. Soon-ish.

It has taken ages and the development of a severely bad conscience on my side, but it's finally done and (almost) finished: The new webpages of www.pallia.net are up and running.

Ah. Finally.

Of course there were a few glitches, and the very last pages are not yet online, but the bulk of the work is done, including burying my arms up to the elbows in the innards of .css-files (something I have never wanted to do), brushing up my html-skills to get things to behave properly, and learning how to install webshop software on a server.

Well, the very last thing is still a work in progress, so it will take a while longer before you will be able to browse a shining new online market stall, and I'm sorry for the further delay - but those things are never as easily done as said. Meanwhile, why don't you hop over to the shining new website (now also available in English) and tell me how you like it?

One of the things I enjoy about being my own boss and doing my own stuff is that I regularly get served with a nice new challenge - something to update, something to change, something to get better next time, something new to add to the stack of goods to sell.

And quite often, those little (or bigger) challenges come with a change to the better. As does the thing I'm facing now... as our Textile Forum gets a bit better known, its ranking on search machines in the 'Net gets higher. And that inevitably leads to more spam.



Last year, I was still sifting out the real entries from the non-real spammy ones by hand, but meanwhile it looks as if there will be a huge lot more spammy entries than last time - so today I have the wonderful opportunity to build an anti-spam trap into the registration questionnaire. So... I'm off to look for an instruction of how to do that!

We all know that The InternetsTM are a non-safe place, so I try to be as safe as possible. That includes the use of Firefox with the NoScript add-on, regular updates to safety-relevant programmes, and so on.

So I'm all for security. Unless... well, unless said extra secure methods keep me from actually paying for something over the Internet. Which is how I spent my morning (and which is why I am only blogging now, not two and a half hours ago as I had planned). I have succumbed to the lure of Leeds and now have been trying to register using the online form... and what can I say? It could be a little more user-friendly, maybe, as in not giving me a time-out that requires me to fill in all the forms again. Or a second time-out. Or forget everything already filled in when I log out. Or actually transmit my card data to my card issuer so that they can authorise the payment. Gah.

It does take a bit of stuff to get me pissed off, but I'm actually a little more than moderately pissed right now. Booking for a conference (or a flight, or whatever) is something that always sort of racks my nerves, so I like to have it run smoothly, not need to try it a gazillion times without success.

Well. I mailed the conference team with my woes, and I hope that it will get solved soon. Anyways (and if I have to mail in the .pdf and pay the extra process fee they charge for not using the online-booking system), I will go to Leeds Congress. Anyone else coming?

Working with a laptop is very nice - it has internal batteries so you can work even if there's no electricity (at least for a while), you can easily take it with you, it takes up little space on the desk even when set up, and there's probably a dozen more reasons. However, laptops also have their little drawbacks - like, for example, that it is not always possible to do an upgrade, or repair something. And probably everybody who has been using a laptop for a while has stumbled across one or more laptop-related problems already.

So... I stumbled over this instruction on how to clean a laptop fan yesterday, and it made me laugh really hard - so I'm passing it on.

Here you go. Clean the fan (or don't).

While blogging on Friday went off into the 'Net without any trouble, things quickly went pearshaped from there - with the wlan on and off again and on and off and finally off only. And then something in the innards of Windows, in the regions where the little drivers sit and make their thing, digested itself. And it was not possible to put that Humpty Dumpty back together again - so I finally had to reinstall Windows.

Let me tell you: That is quite an experience. I think it must have been a dozen times that the computer booted and did something (always stating "setup is preparing your computer for first use") and then re-booting. After a while of this continuous rebooting game with things done inbetween, it cried for the supplementary driver CD (which it got) and then had some more quality boot-and-reboot time. And then it actually finished.

On the down side, that now means that I have to re-install the ten or so programmes that I had already installed. On the up side, the pre-configured and pre-installed computer came with about 30 Gigabytes taken on the drive C. Thirty Freaking Gigabytes! For the operating system! I remember those times - that are not so very long gone - when a whole hard disk with 30 Gigabytes was a huge disk, and a very modern (and expensive) thing to have. Maybe I have lived under a rock the last years, but do operating systems really need to have so much disk space? I had very much planned to use the extra GBytes for storing more photos and documents, not more system. Well, after the re-installation, the new system takes up only (only! hah!) twenty gigabytes. That's ten more for me (once I figure out if some partition magic programme can shift partitions on Win7, that is).
Oh, and the connectivity problem, by the way, is not completely solved yet - though we now have a better idea what might cause the problem. So there will be some more configuring fun in the next days.

On the non-so-software-front, not too much got done (obviously) - a little bit of sewing on the tent and a little bit of knitting. I hope to get the hat testknit finished today or maybe, if I can't find much time for that, tomorrow.

...fruit flies like a banana.

It took me a good while to make it back into the internet - now on the new computer. I have a feeling that it will take me a few days to get used to the new kid on the desk, but I already had some good laughs (and some moments of severe d'oh).

You'd think that Microsoft Windows 7 would come from Microsoft, right? And the Office suite - Microsoft, right? So I got a good laugh when the brand-new system did get all agitated and warning when I tried to install my old Office suite... because "do you really want to allow that software from an unknown author to change something on your computer? Reallyreally?"

Well... actually... yes. That was the reason I put in the CD and clicked "install", you know?

Apart from that (and the fairly annoying getting-into-the-internet-problems) and the new keyboard that I need to get used to (and tweak with my custom keyboard settings), Win7 does look nice, and things all went quite smoothly. And I really love how easy it was to transplant my Firefox settings to their new home - copy the profile folder, mend the folder name in the profile.ini, and that was it!

Now, please excuse me while I spend most of this day with deinstalling stuff (Win7 comes with about 30 gigabyte of disk space already taken, and I'm still wondering by what) and installing stuff (I have a huge list of programmes on my old 'puter, and I actually do use quite a few of them).