Ocean Of Perspectives

Yesterday was an odd day for me. I woke up dreading what I knew I would be facing. It was Parent/Teacher Conference day. I have a very intelligent and easy going child, so why would I dread meeting with her teacher?

I was aware that my daughter has taken a dislike to one of her teacher’s. This is actually the first time she has had this regarding any of her teachers in the US. This is the teacher’s assistant for her class and is the one teaching Algebra.

Part of the problem is that she is better at the subject than this teacher, and she’s just learning Algebra. This has caused her to lose respect for this teacher and she becomes impatient with him. She has told me some of the problems she has been having with him and of her less than appropriate behavior. Needless to say, we have been discussing this a lot.

I had talked to her teacher over the phone, expressing my concerns regarding my daughter and the teacher’s assistant, and asked him if he could get to the root of the problem. But the situation continued to deteriorate.

I finally told her that battles between teachers and students will generally end with the student losing, that sometimes you just have to put up with the situation or change classes. She doesn’t want to change to another classroom and I don’t want her to give up algebra. So she has been chilling out lately. But I was sure I was going to hear about it at the conference.

It actually went better than I thought it would. The teacher’s assistant wasn’t present during the conference and the problems my daughter was having with him was only discussed briefly after I brought it up.

So what does this have to do with being in the moment or having a senior moment? I ask for your patience, its coming.

After the conference with the teacher, we stopped at the vitamin store, then went to order a pizza to take home for dinner and proceeded home without any problems.

I should note here that I don’t always wear my eye glasses. When I’m out I carry them in my hand and put them on to read or to look at something more closely or when I’m driving.

So when I got out of the car, my glasses were in my hand and I went into the house, put the pizza on the counter, grabbed the vitamins, opened them and had my daughter take them. I then grabbed the cotton and the wrappers from the vitamin bottles and threw them into the garbage. When I did this, I heard an unexpected thud, but dismissed it.

We ate dinner and after cleaning up the kitchen, it was time to check my Entracard drops and do a few other things regarding my site. So I went to get my glasses and they were not where I thought I had left them. So I went to the dinning table and they were not there either. I spent at least half an hour trying to find my glasses before I gave up. I’m sitting, going over everything in my mind when I suddenly remembered the thud I had heard. Do you know where this is going now?

I pull out the garbage container, looked at it with disdain and started to riffle through it. Guess what I found. Yep, my eyeglasses. Apparently I still had them in my hand when I opened the vitamins and when I threw the cotton and wrappers away. Let’s all say “ewww.”

So is that a situation of not being in the now or is it a senior moment?

Tags: Miscellaneous by Lea
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As you know, the winter months are approaching. What that means for me is that soon we will have winter storms. I’m not talking about snow storms, I mean rain and high winds. Living in a remote area of the mountains of northern California, we have a lot of trees. Not just average sized trees, but the beautiful giant Redwoods.

During one bad storm last winter, a redwood tree fell on top of the tourist motel’s office. Not only did it cause severe damage to the motel’s office and a car parked near by, but it took down a major power line. We were without power and telephone for a week. We also experience tree branches falling during high winds and causing fires when they land on power lines. This is particularly scary as we have a power line running parallel to our house, which is surrounded by Redwoods and other trees.

So why am I telling you all this? Because I’m faced with the likely possibly that there will be times when I will not be able to use my computer or have an internet connection.

Like yesterday we had power, but the rain caused us to lose our wireless internet connection. For several hours I was unable to get online. It was particularly frustrating as I was in the middle of making some major changes to my theme template to accommodate my Amazon store pages when it happened. I did manage to successfully complete my efforts late last night.

In anticipation of winter’s weather inconveniences,  I’m intend to write several posts and schedule them ahead in preparation of the season. There won’t be anything I can do about my Entracard droppers, other than to assure all of you that, if/when I’m cut off from the internet, I will make every effort to return your drops. One benefit is that my top and recent droppers are on RSS feeds, so they will be automatically updated. Since I moderate comments, they will also be affected. So please be assured that if I’m not able to access the internet for a while, approving and answering comments will be a priority as well.

In case any of my none Entracard readers are unfamiliar with what Entracard is, you don’t have to be a member to click on any of the sites that look interesting to you and I hope you will also visit the site pictured above the “get one” Entracard bar. I mention this only because I have no way of knowing if all my visitors are aware of this.

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend filled with many blessings!

Tags: Miscellaneous by Lea
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Update

After doing a lot of searching for information and coding that would work with my main theme, I found a couple of sites that helped me make modifications to suit my needs for my affiliate store pages “Energy Healing, Yoga At Home,” etc.

Basically, the problem I was having with embedding the store codes into my pages was that with the sidebars, the content area was not large enough to accommodate the width of the store. Attempts to adjust the store’s width were unsuccessful at the time. Though later I discovered that by dropping the percent symbol (%) in the width part of the code, I was able to easily adjust the store’s width. That was after putting in place a second page.php and CSS for my modified pages.

What I did through my Cpanel was in my current themes files (Darkwater-11), I clicked on “make a new file.” Then I copied and pasted Darkwater-11 page.php into the new file and made the modifications I wanted, which in my case was to remove the code calling the sidebars. I had to name the file, which “store_page.php” would be a good example for this.

To verify that this removed my themes sidebars for specific pages and not my entire site, I logged in to my WordPress admin panel, went to the edit page of my store, scrolled down to the drop down box labeled themes and clicked it to open it. I saw my modified theme’s name, clicked it and saved. When I viewed the page on my site, the sidebars were gone. Excellent. But, the store still was not displaying fully. After more searching, I discovered that I needed to create a modified CSS to go with the “store_page.php.”

I did this using the same procedure of creating a new file in my Darkwater-11 theme, copied and pasted Darkwater-11 CSS file to the new file, adjusted the width under “wrapper” and named the file “store_CSS.” Then the only other adjustment I made was to remove the percent symbol at the width in my stores code and put in a number. Then the store’s width filled the width of my page. Ta Da.

Here are websites that I found to be the most helpful to me. Just copy and paste into your browser bar:

This site is owned by the designer of Darkwater-11, but his information is helpful regardless of your theme or who designed it. He writes about decreasing theme widths, so I did the steps, but increased my  theme’s wrapper width.

http://antbag.com/how-to-change-the-width-of-your-blog-design/

Since I can remember, I have not been able to offer my visitors an easy access to my archives and attempts at creating an archive page met with failure as well. That is until I found this site-

http://justintadlock.com/archives/2008/10/02/if-you-were-a-wordpress-theme-developer-page-templates

The above site also helped with my sidebar issue for my store pages.

And of course, there is the WordPress codex:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Creating_your_own_Page_Templates

If you are looking to make modifications to your theme, I hope this is of help to you.

Original post

I apologize for not having a new post ready for today. I have spent a lot of time lately, including this past weekend, searching the internet for codes that would work on my site.

Originally, I wanted to find a way that would give me an option to use different themes for some of my pages. I don’t know HTML, CSS, PHP and so on. So I have to try to locate such information on the internet and it has to work within WordPress.

In the beginning, I wasn’t able find anything that was associated with what I specifically wanted to accomplish. But I did find information on multiple blogs, i.e. multiblogs, using one WordPress installation with the ability for each blog to have different themes and so on. So I thought, since I’m not finding the information I want, this might work in its place.

I first tried the WordPress extend from Stephen Rider called Virtual Multiblog. I followed his instructions, (which were a little confusing to me), but nothing happened no matter how many times I went over the procedures. I also tried the step by step instructions one of his commentors shared on the site, showing how he was able to get it to work on his site. But I still wasn’t able to make it work. So, back to the internet I went.

I found more codes for multiblogs on one WordPress installation; most of them were confusing and complicated, except one that I came across which only required putting a specific code in the config file. This worked! I was able to setup a blog. Woohoo! Except after setting up a second blog, I discovered I wasn’t able to access my first blog, Ocean Of Perspectives, which meant that my visitors were unable to access it too. Not good. I take back my woohoo.

So after about two weeks of attempting this with either no success or unsatisfactory results, last night I went back to searching for my original inquiry, using different themes for certain pages. This time I did find some information on it. But by this time it was late and I was tired. So I bookmarked the web pages and went to bed.

Today I will go through these and see if I can get any of the codes to work without throwing Ocean Of Perspectives offline again.

Tags: Miscellaneous by Lea
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I was making some changes yesterday in files on my server. Nothing I was doing seemed to affect the function of this site while I was making the changes. I was satisfied that everything was fine.

Then a few hours later I got a message by a service that monitors my site stating that Ocean Of Perspectives was “unresponsive.”  So I typed www.oceanofperspectives.com into my browser and I got a “Database Error!”  I was puzzled to say the least and not happy.

I checked my servers status, all points were green, the running status said up and there was zero for the amount of downtime for this month. Everything was showing that the server was fine and running. So I naturally then assumed that at least some of the changes I made earlier broke my connection to my database somehow. I started deleting some of the changes, but I still got database error when trying to access my site. I ended up deleting every change I made to no avail at correcting the database error.

Finally I contacted my host and told them about the error. They checked and told me that my password for the database didn’t match and asked if it had been changed? I was a little confused as I have been using the same password since I started Ocean Of Perspectives.

My host offered to correct the password issue and I gave them permission to do so. Problem immediately solved. Though I still don’t understand why I would have a password issue to begin with. I’m just glad that everything is working again.

So if you tried to visit yesterday and got a Database Error, now you know why.

Tags: Miscellaneous by Lea
13 Comments »

While doing my Entracard drops yesterday, a site I visited had a post about another website called Talkreviews. The author described this site as a place to get information and stats on websites worldwide. So out of curiosity, I clicked on this site’s link that was provided in the article. When I did a search for www.oceanofperspectives.com, this is what came up for my site:

“featured site: oceanofperspectives

oceanofperspectives.com

*Warning: This site may contain adult content.  If you do not wish to view a page that you may feel inappropriate, we recommend that you do not follow the provided link to website’s homepage.”

Excuse me??!!!! A warning of possible adult content rating for Ocean Of Perspectives? Give me a break!!!! Where does the webmasters of this site get their information anyway?

I know I have encountered some weird sites linking to me that I have no control over. I delete all spammy comments that my spam catcher snags. But I don’t have any control over who adds Ocean Of Perspectives to their blogroll. Though for the life of me I have no idea why a pornography related website would want to link to this site. I did get some unusual internal site searches in the past though. Sorry whoever, you got zero results on your search for anal sex because I DON’T WRITE ABOUT SEX or anything related to it. So you won’t find anything on it here. Another curiosity is how many referrals from search engines I get inquiring about ocean sex. Is that different than sex on the beach or marine animal sex?

Click the link to Talk Review here if you want to check their website’s rating and stats for your site.

Tags: Miscellaneous by Lea
12 Comments »

I try to post daily, but the past few days I have been feeling mentally and emotionally scattered after receiving the news of my mother’s passing. Yesterday, my sister and I didn’t hear from family in the east, but we really didn’t expect to, as yesterday was mom’s funeral. I did receive an email later in the day from my nephew’s wife telling me the funeral was nice and it was packed with people. Thank you MT for letting us know. It meant a lot to us.

Today we have been receiving calls from more family members letting us know how the funeral went and the people, family and friends, who came to pay their respects and to see family members they hadn’t seen in a really long time. My brothers and sisters saw friends they grew up with, but hadn’t seen since high school days. That helped the funeral take on a more positive aspect too.

We were told that mom really looked good. The description we were given was that she looked peaceful and had a slight smile. I was told that my son was a pall bearer and at the cemetery, he visited his sister’s grave. This is a sister he never knew as she was born before him and died three hours after birth. I’m a little surprised that he thought of it, but I think it was a nice gesture on his part and shows his tender spirit. Men seldom have the opportunity to freely show their sensitive nature.

I would also like to thank everyone who came to Ocean Of Perspectives during this time, for your warm and comforting comments. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and compassion. God bless you.

Goodbye mom, I’m thinking of you.

Tags: Miscellaneous by Lea
10 Comments »