Tien Chiu

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Adding the travel section

This is proving easier than I expected!  I have now, as you may or may not have noticed, imported my entire travel blog (links on the right-hand side) and am starting to bring over my travel photo pages.  There are a lot of them, so I expect it will take awhile to get all the content up there, but the framework is done.  I am very happy, especially since I discovered that no custom code is required.  The photo gallery plugin that I’m using does it all, and very neatly!

So check out the travel blog, if you haven’t already.  And the photos from Thailand, though I still need to finish off the galleries.  Unfortunately I have to leave for an all-day puzzle game soon, so I probably won’t get to finish off all the galleries for Thailand, but I’ve made a good start.

Oh, and I wove a yard of fabric yesterday.  I had worried that it might become tedious, and was starting to get bored, but then I decided to start working on my technique, using the things that Laura Fry taught me.  Whew!  It’s really hard to un-learn muscle memory, but my rhythm of throwing and catching the shuttle, then beating, has really improved.  I’ve been striving for smoothness of movement, not focusing on speed yet – but I can sense that speed will come in time.  This is keeping me so focused and intent that I barely notice time passing.

My plan for this coming week is to work as hard as I can on weaving and the website.  My goal is to get 13 yards woven by end of day Wednesday, which means weaving up 2 yards/day for the next five days.  Ambitious, but I think I can probably do it. I would also like to port over my entire website in the same time period – basically working on the website or weaving, dawn to dusk.  That is also an ambitious goal, but I really want to get this stuff done before starting the new job, as I don’t know how much time/energy I’ll have afterwards.

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Good news all ’round

The first piece of good news is fairly obvious: I have successfully migrated my blog to the new site!  It took quite a bit of fiddling and one conversation with tech support on my new hosting company, but I got things looking more or less as I’d wanted.  So from here on out, I will be posting my blog entries here.  (I guess that makes the new site the “real” one now!)

Second piece of good news: interview yesterday went well, and I had an excellent conversation with the company’s HR director today.  I think I could be employed again as early as next week (!).  Which means I better get cracking on the weaving!

Third piece of good news: I’m nearly done threading!  I expect to finish threading, tie on, and start weaving tonight, or tomorrow morning at latest.

So all in all, a good day.

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Back to work!

The 30-dent reed arrived yesterday (yay!!), so it’s time to start work on the sample again.  I got it beamed on and nicely draped from the lease sticks yesterday, so today will be all about threading.  I haven’t yet solved the problem of what to use as a sleying hook, given that the reed is so fine, but I’m thinking some kind of (suitably bent-into-shape) piano wire might be in order.  So now the problem becomes finding piano wire, or some other sort of stiff, fine wire.  Fortunately it will take me a day or two to thread all 1000 threads, so I have some time to figure out where to find a musician’s store or obscure hobby shop.

The web redesign is proceeding nicely; I added more content and changed s0me of the colors yesterday.  The background is now a very pale purple, and the menu is purple with orange text.  The purple and orange were both taken out of the header image, so harmonize nicely with the header image.  I also added three or four projects, a time-consuming process since I have to upload a photo gallery for each project.  I have gallery software that allows me to upload the photos all at once, but I still have to enter captions, alt text, and descriptions for each photo.  But the end results look very nice, if I do say so myself.  🙂

Cynthia asked how much tomato soup the recipe makes.  It’s about 2 gallons, give or take; I’m a lazy cook and like getting a lot of soup for my efforts.  It freezes very nicely.

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Making progress on the redesign!

Hop on over to the new website and see what you think!

So far I have set up the homepage template (much head-scratching) and the category page template (more head-scratching and a few visits to the WordPress support forum for help).  It’s been quite a bit of PHP work, and a lot of sleuthing around in the documentation, but I finally got it working more or less the way I want it.  In fact, I have succeeded in the main objective of my first “sprint” – getting the weaving section up and presentable – and I am very happy.  Over the next day or two my goal is to enter as many of my weaving projects as I can (and while I’m at it, I’ll probably upload them to Weavolution as well).

It’s been a lot of work – probably a good solid 15-20 hours of puzzling away – but I’ve learned a lot about WordPress and about PHP along the way.  I don’t know that I could write PHP “from scratch”, but I can take a lot of code snippets and misc. functions, and cobble them together into what I want.  That’s good enough for me, at least for now.

Tell me what you think I should do with the color scheme; it’s looking pretty bare-bones at the moment.  I’d sort of like to jazz it up a little bit (though I would prefer spare and elegant to “busy”-looking), just have absolutely no idea how.

Have beamed on about half the warp today (it’s only a 12″ wide sample though, so don’t look too impressed) and am hoping to get the rest done before bedtime.  But I’m in no hurry; the reed won’t arrive for a few days yet!

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Web redesign progress

Hop on over to my new website, and you’ll see what I’ve been up to.  There isn’t any real  content yet, but I’ve managed to set up the  basic framework.  On my homepage, you see the following items:

  • the most recently posted unfinished work
  • the most recently posted finished work
  • Excerpt from my latest blog entry
  • Randomly selected finished work

There’s a lot yet to be done (set up the sidebars, format things to look pretty, add real content, etc.) but the underlying code is there.  I know it doesn’t look like much, but there was a great deal of custom code required to put this together!  By default, WordPress just displays the 10 most recently completed posts on the home page.  I had to figure out how to get the most recent post from a given category to display (finished works, unfinished works, blog), install a plugin to generate a random post, and get a “cover image” for each finished/unfinished work to display.  It wasn’t easy, but I figured it out.

A plug for WordPress here: it is a wonderful platform for the artist and novice developer: highly customizable, but also EXTREMELY well-documented.  If you want to know how to use a particular function, the documentation will probably contain not only the information you need but also the code snippet that does what you wanted it to do.  It’s very clear and easy  to read, good for someone who doesn’t program PHP professionally but can understand syntax and modify code snippets.  (i.e., me!)  The documentation was one of the primary reasons I chose WordPress; with its help I’ve been able to do quite a bit of magic that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to accomplish.

Meanwhile, I have beamed on the 120/2 silk warp and am about halfway through threading.  It was pretty challenging at the beginning (I had a hard time distinguishing the threads) but, 500 threads into it, it’s starting to go quickly.  I expect to tie on and begin weaving today.