Yarnification

Just a quick note—my comment moderation seems to have a mind of its own these days. I haven’t changed a thing, but lately it’s developed a habit of holding perfectly innocent comments for moderation when they don’t seem to even remotely meet the criteria I set up.

I’m not entirely sure whether, when it decides a comment needs to be moderated, it actually tells you that your comment is being held until I look at it, or if it just looks like your comment vanished into the ether, so I thought I’d mention I’ve been having an issue with that.

Is there anyone out there who uses Gallery? Have you ever seen it flake out randomly for no readily apparent reason? I was just looking for something in my gallery and noticed that the thread crochet sub-album had mysteriously renamed itself “Crochet Projects”, which is the name of the album it’s part of.

I wonder if that happened the day I somehow cross-linked the descriptions for two different pictures and I just never noticed until now. But I was also editing some album properties recently by changing them on the main album and telling it to apply it to all the albums underneath, but it promised me that applying the changes to nested albums wouldn’t affect the album titles. And it didn’t affect anything else. Freaky.

Maybe I should update to the newest version, ya think?

First, a bit of advice for any of you using Gallery for your photos: Never, ever, ever try to edit the description text of one photo while you’re uploading another photo. I just did that, and the text for the one photo got attached to the new photo and vice versa. No amount of re-editing could fix it, and I had to delete them both and start over. (Grr.)

I finally finished the thread version of Jess’s Winged Hair Kerchief that I’ve been working on for a while. Photos:

And from the front, not that you can see much of it due to the angle:

It’s me, standing in front of a block wall! Kinda like a mug shot, only with a cute hair accessory! (I’m at work, hence the block wall background.)

I just kept on going with the pattern until it was big enough. The only thing I changed was the last bit of edging around the front, which I changed to hdc because I decided it would look better since everything was so tiny to begin with. I chained about 99 for the ties. Started to slip stitch back up the chain to make it more substantial but decided not to. I probably should have, since the ties are pretty thin and a little hard to get hold of. I might attach more thread on and slip stitch down the chains after all to make them thicker.

Tip for making bullion stitches: I got lots of practice with these since there were so many more than in the first one I did in ww yarn. My major trouble with them was getting the hook through, and I found a trick to it. (Aside from wrapping the yarn loosely enough, which is of course crucial to the process.) If the hook gets stuck partway through, try twirling it a bit. I started doing that and they went so much easier after that. A bit of twirling and the hook would free up and slide right through.

The other main thing I’ve been working on lately is Marvie’s Purse with No Name. I’ve been through the desert with a purse with no name… Er. Sorry. That made that song run through my head. (Or does the purse have a name now and I haven’t caught on?) I’m very nearly done, but I got stuck on the handles and needed to put it down for a bit, so I spent a few days playing with tatting and finishing up the kerchief.

Right now I can’t feel the tip of my left ring finger. By “tip” I mean most of the entire end of the finger from the last joint on. While I was finishing the kerchief last night, toward the end I noticed that fingertip getting a little bit tingly, but I ignored it because I really wanted to finish. Then when I was done I realized it all numb. I’m left-handed and hold the hook knife-style, and picking up a hook to check, the numbest part is right where the hook rests against that finger. It’s got to be from the pressure or something; doing that last bit of edging took some work since I was working into tight bits.

At the time I figured it’d be better by morning. It wasn’t—it’s just as numb today. I am slightly freaked out by this. I figure I’ve just pinched a nerve or something and it’ll get better over a few days, but it’s still a bit disturbing. And strangely enough it’s practically all I can notice. You’d think that with it being numb I wouldn’t notice it, but I keep noticing it because it feels wrong.

Tonight I noticed a couple of things: First, my feed was only giving summaries, not full posts. And second (once I’d fixed the first thing), my hotlinking protection wasn’t set to allow Bloglines to display my images, so once the full posts showed up the images didn’t seem to be showing up.

This should be fixed now. The feed should show up to 25 unread posts, full text rather than summaries (unless you set it to show just summaries in your Bloglines subscription), and the images should show up. If anyone sees any problems, please let me know, okay? Either in the comments, or my email address is over on the sidebar. Thanks! :)

Note: Yesterday I changed the code that inserts the project progress bars over there on the side of the page so as to make it XHTML-compliant and to add alternate text so that anyone who doesn’t have Flash installed will see a text version of the percentage instead of a broken thing. I checked it in Mozilla and Internet Explorer on my system and in Lynx (text-based browser, so as to make sure the alternate text version would show up) through my shell account, but if the progress bars seem to be broken in your browser, please drop me a line or leave a comment, okay? ( yarnification@daisywreath.net ) And if you’re using these same bars and want a copy of the compliant code, I’d be happy to pass it along.

I’ve got one snowflake done so far for the Snowflake Crochet-Along:

(clickable for full-size version and pattern info, but the full size one is super blurry)

The Kittycat Progress Report: Cat seems to be almost entirely better. He has more energy, he’s running around and playing, and he’s fighting back about taking his pill twice a day (at first he just lay there and took it, all dispirited-like), all of which is really nice to see. Though not so easy to give him the pill now. And this morning he finally realized that he could pretend to swallow the pill, then go spit it out in the corner, so we’re having to watch him like a hawk to make sure he actually swallowed it.

He’s not constantly straining to pee now, and he’s not peeing in inappropriate places. (Hooray!) He’s still peeing more often than usual, but we were told to expect that for a while, and that as long as he’s peeing and not straining he should be fine. He has another week of antibiotics to go, too.

We’re giving him (and Lena, since there’d surely be hell to pay if we tried to give it to just Kittycat) a half a can of wet food in the morning and a half a can at night, too. They are all in favor of this. We’re planning to cut back to a quarter can each in the morning and at night, so they’d each be getting a half can a day, because they have shown no sign of slowing down with the crunchies and we don’t really want them to turn into Kittyzillas. We’ll see how it goes. Loco thinks it’s patently unfair that we’re giving the cats something so yummy-smelling and not giving any to him. I tried explaining to him that the cats didn’t get to eat the equivalent of half a hamburger last night in combined bits from the three of us, but he does not buy this excuse and feels that I should run out to Walmart and pick him up some Alpo.

One final word about feeds: I finally got the redirects working for the blog feeds. You should not have to change your Bloglines subscription now because Bloglines will try to check the feed and will be fooled into thinking it’s in the same place it always was. I checked this morning and the exclamation points they put next to broken feeds are gone, so theoretically there are no worries there.

Something about crochet, for once: I have about one and a third squares left to make, then it’s on to edging/joinging the afghan. And weaving in the ends—in the beginning I was determined to do that as I went along but as usual, I started putting it off. It shouldn’t be too bad, four ends for each square (including the ends made when I edge and join them) times 36 squares…144 ends, minus probably 20 or 30 that I’ve already done. Not half as bad as that throw rug where I saved them all to the end and found out there were something like 400 of them. (Yes, I really do figure up how many ends there are to do. I know that’s dorky but it makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere once I get started.) Almost there!

I will be back shortly with a photo of a surprise I got in the mail :) but right now I’m still working on my coffee, and my minimal photography skills just aren’t at their best this early in the day…

Oh, and look! I got to the bottom of the category list on the right not nesting properly. Turns out I needed to download a new file to fix a bug that was in the release I installed. Oops! Guess I should’ve checked the support forums before I spent all that time searching the documentation for info on how to sort the list!

It turns out that the feed addresses changed with the upgrade. The new addresses are:

RSS feed: http://daisywreath.net/crochet/feed/
Atom feed: http://daisywreath.net/crochet/feed/atom/
Bloglines subscribe URL: Subscribe with Bloglines

I hope Bloglines updates things automatically, because I checked and both my old feeds show up with the exclamation point, and no posts show up after I did the upgrade. I put some server-side redirects in, so with any luck the old Bloglines feeds will stop being broken because they automatically forward to the new addresses now. In theory, anyway—I’ll have to check later at Bloglines and see if that’s what actually happens…

Now if only I can get the list of categories fixed so it’s not such a jumbled-up mess!

Hey, look, the comments aren’t broken anymore!

As far as I’m aware, the only things that are still broken are one of my feeds and the messed-up category nesting over in the sidebar.

If you use Bloglines or some service like that and it says my feed is broken, try using this one instead: http://daisywreath.net/crochet/feed/. I’ll try to get the other feed working again, too. I’ve read what’s involved in getting it un-broken but haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet…

My list of categories is a mess—it used to be sorted with yarn-related stuff all indented underneath yarn and thread-related stuff indented under thread, but it doesn’t seem to want to do that now. Hmmph.

And, erm, the comments are here but also not here at the same time. I can still see them all in the administration area, but they’re missing when you click on a comments link. Double hmmph. This one is probably my fault. I renamed the comments files a while ago to help foil spammers, and I don’t think I’ve made sure yet that it’s looking for the comments in the right place.

Other than that I think things are under control. If anyone notices anything that seems broken other than the categories and comments, I’d be super grateful if you’d let me know— yarnification@daisywreath.net since the comments are down right now…

I’m planning to upgrade to the new version of WordPress today, so if things look all haywire for a while that’s the reason.