Okay, it's been far too long since I last updated here, but to my credit I have had problems. I couldn't FTP for a while (might've been something at my end -- either way, it works now), I couldn't view my site, it started having pop-ups... *sigh* Everything is happily back to normal once again, so I figure I'll at least update here a time or two.

I've decided to make a complete break from the current layout, which means I'm not going with either this layout or the alternate one that my poll below is about. I wanted to experiment with a whole new design, my own backgrounds and colors, etc., but I didn't want to wait for everything to settle down here, so I've been putting it elsewhere. It's far from done yet, and there are a couple pages I'm not redesigning -- they're staying as-is -- but here it is: My new site layout. The Links page has been redone (I might add back in the paws for bullets, but not yet... might want to change my colors slightly to match the new scheme), and all my News has been redone. Also, there's news there that's not here. Probably when I link everything together and move it here, I'll sort of use these posts and the ones from there, and kinda annotate them as to what they refer to.

I now have my entire news section up and ready to go. Also, I've made the buttons to the side bigger, more noticeable, and more colorful.

One piece of happy news that is long in coming here, is that my fiancé's mom had a beautiful new baby girl on Friday, December 28, 2001. She weighed 6 pounds, 12 ounces, and was 19.5 inches long at birth. While she is keeping them up a lot still, she is fairly quiet, and she truly is beautiful. Her name is Elizabeth Noel Hill, and I thought I'd put up a picture sent to me by her daddy (click to see the full size picture):

Oh, and if you haven't noticed already, my page isn't really functional yet. The only link that works right now is the guestbook, since it's on the Wired-Wolf.net server also. Hopefully I'll get everything laid out one by one -- I'm striving for a more uniform look with my pages, so I'm working on that. A few things won't be changed over, for sure, one being my tribute to Squeeker and the other being my Spam Offer. (The former must stay as-is, because it's my tribute to my sweet kitty who died too young through no fault of his own; the latter stays because it's sort of a generated form letter to any and all would-be spammers, in a business letter legalese format.) However, these aren't even up yet, as I haven't had the chance to upload them -- the spam offer should come up "post haste" and you might see it later today; the other is a lot more involved and will take just sheer time uploading everything.

Well, this is a new year, and I've decided to go with this as my new homepage layout. What do you think? I'm working on it, but I think when I get it the way I want I'll like it. We'll just have to wait and see though, since who knows what will happen...

In any case, the page you're viewing now will be going to my "real" host as soon as I get a few things straightened out there. There've been troubles there but hopefully I'll be able to get everything fixed.

(The problems are, that first of all, I paid to have pop-ups removed for 3 years, less than a year ago, and now they're back. Also, I'm a member of their Cadre, which is people who're willing to help out their fellow members (I was invited to be a moderator on their forums, which are currently down because they were crashing big-time). This gave me a free premium URL (our own subdomain, kinda like this one is) along with FTP access. Well, I haven't had the FTP access for some time, and then my subdomain stopped working.

All of this has been going on with me sending emails to the Cadre organizer, who's a member of the staff, and to the URL for premium services. However, I've gotten no responses, and I think I figured this out fresh one morning before work when I got back a spam report that I tried to email to their abuse line. I sent it about a month or more previous to when I got the bounce, and the bounce was because of their spam filters stopping my ISP's SMTP server... I even got the bounce message to my ISP's email address, NOT the email address I used (having an account also means getting an email addy, which is the one I used).

Well... I had been using my ISP's SMTP server because they say it's usually quicker than using theirs, and also sometimes ISPs don't allow sending with other SMTP servers when you're connected to them. But, I just switched my email program (Netscape 6.2 -- likin' it!) to use my host's SMTP server, and sent test messages to myself, which didn't disappear into the ether. So I'm guessing those email messages I sent to those other addresses got spam blocked, but it's either taking a 'coon's age to get the bounces or else I'm not going to get them at all. Now that I've actually switched my SMTP server for that mail account, I'm going to try emailing them again about the problems and see if I get through this time -- and I'll mention that I never knew my emails weren't getting through because I never got the bounces.)