I tend to take this sort of thing with a grain of salt, but I love to share the results when this sort of personality predictor matches my own self-impressions. How could I resist this one?

Your Birthday: 03.30

FADED ROSE
PANTONE® 18-1629
STORYTELLER
THINKER
MESSENGER

PEOPLE BORN on this day tend to teach others through the stories they share. Whether you are singing a song, writing a play or painting a picture, you are able to convey images and emotions that can affect others. It is very important for you to stay active and communicate. Your thoughts can turn to worry if you are not expressing yourself and connecting with the world at large. Your personal color embodies love, passion and courage. Wearing, meditating or surrounding yourself with Faded Rose lends you courage and enthusiasm as you connect with others and find your place in the circle of life.

Okay, so I not only failed to resist, I changed my whole blog layout to coordinate — I wanted a new look, anyway, and Faded Rose seemed as good a theme as any. It still needs some tweaking, and I’d like to get a more visually interesting header up at the top. But this will do for now. At least…until I get sick of the pink!

What about you? What’s your Colorstrology?

Please pardon our dust.

The daycare my daughters attend is closed today, so I’m home this morning with the younger one (Lucy’s at summer school*). I have a couple stamps I want to carve, but since I’m out of carving material and the stores aren’t even open yet, I’m wasting some time playing on the computer (I could be writing, I suppose, but I’m not much good at anything first thing in the morning). I was looking at the stats for this blog, and discovered the map to the left, which shows where all the visitors come from (not those of you who read via LiveJournal, I’m afraid!). It’s kind of cool: if you click on the red pointers in the actual interface (not this screen capture) it gives you all the specifics about each visitor, like what browser they were using and so forth. Can you identify your pointer?

*Lucy’s summer school is an enrichment program — she’s taking violin, creative writing and courses called “Kings and Legends” and “Journey to Middle Earth.” She’s actually learning Sindarin, believe it or not! All the same, I think she’d rather be at the daycare with her sister, and playing Pokemon on her Nintendo DS.

I logged into my blog Friday afternoon with the intention of upgrading a few plugins, spring cleaning and rearranging here and there, and making a post or two. I ended up moving my domain to a whole new host.

Largely, it was the inability to run the Askimet plugin that prompted the decision. After getting hit by 100+ spam comments on these pages in the past 10 days, I figured I needed to improve my spam-blocking methods. Askimet is supposed to be the premier spam-blocker for WordPress, but my former host was not configured to permit Askimet to work. This is not the first time I’ve had this problem using plugins on my old host. Not more than a month ago I had to ask them to change the settings on my account to allow the Livejournal crossposter to work, and there are several other third-party plugins that I have had to abandon because of their restrictions.

And then one of their sales reps had the nerve to email me this week and ask me if I was happy with my service and “wouldn’t I really rather upgrade to an annual payment?”

Got me thinking.

Got me moving.

Found a new host that is cheaper and more explicitly friendly to WordPress and signed on. Everything is uploaded to the new host now (or nearly everything…the defunct family blog is not set up yet) and the DNS has been changed but clearly everything is not perfect. For instance, while the front page of this blog is happily visible, if you click on anything, you’re going to get one of those lovely 404 errors. I need to figure out what’s up with that. My sub-sites (She’s a Doll! and Promise) are available, should anyone care to visit there.

But I’m working on it. I just wanted to give a heads up to anyone who might be visiting here. Hopefully it will all be resolved soon.

In the meantime, if you have any recommendations for changes or additions to this blog and site — content, layout, anything — now’s the time to speak up, while everything’s all shook up and I don’t know how it will settle.

EDIT: 30 minutes (and several interruptions) later, I was able to fix the link problem by updating my .htaccess file. Now…on to content!

I just adore this picture I found in a Livejournal community — be sure to click on it to see it full sized.

The artist is named Fefa Koroleva, and that’s all I know since she’s Russian and I can’t read anything in her blog or gallery site. A shame, too. I’d love to know more about how she works. Is it entirely digital, or are some of the elements done the old fashioned cut-n-paste way?

Regardless, it’s given me some ideas about how tackle this project idea that’s been growing in my head, but was feeling hampered by my severe lack of figure drawing ability — I really didn’t want to have to put it off until I could take drawing lessons, you know?

In slightly unrelated news, I’ve been playing with the layout here. New graphics so far, and some organizational changes down the line. Still not sure what I’ll end up with, but it’s fun tweaking things!

After a few technical delays and the kindly intervention of my webhost, I finally got the LiveJournal crossposter plugin for WordPress working. So if you’re reading this on LiveJournal, please go read this post from a couple days ago, in which I ’splain the whole point of using the plugin in the first place.

My life is like a big novel, when all the little subplots start to come together into one big story…

Okay, so maybe that’s a little exaggerated. My life is not nearly that dramatic, but I have noticed some parts of my life that were previously separate starting to come together in ways I had not ever anticipated.

I have just started a new job as a part-time associate editor for the company for whom I have been freelancing for nearly a year. Stampington & Company, besides producing their own rubber stamps and artists’ supplies, publishes a number of very fine magazines on papercrafts, mixed media, collage and various other crafty pursuits. It has been immensely satisfying to combine my vocation (writing) with my hobby (crafts). Yes, I am a lifelong crafter, having dabbled in a little bit in everything but most especially in papercrafts (rubber stamping, cardmaking, etc.), at least in the last few years. But I never thought to write about it! The opportunity I have now, to bring these two halves of my creative self together is liberating, to say the least. I feel more satisfied, personally, and engaged, professionally, then I have in years.

But the dovetailing continues.

The particular project I have been brought aboard to work on is a special publication meant to showcase some of the excellent artists’ blogs out here on the web. Once I got over my doubts about whether or not people would actually pay for such a magazine (and I do think they will, once they see what we’ve got planned), my biggest questions were, 1) how to decide which blogs to include, and 2) how to produce 15-20 articles about the blogs that didn’t all read as some variation of “I saw all these other blogs and so I started one too.”

The answer to the first question was really pretty easy: we’re an art magazine publisher first, and so high-quality images are the top thing I’ve been looking for in potential blog candidates. The answer to the second question hit me almost out of the blue after three or four days spent clicking through blog after blog after blog — and it all came down to the same topic I’ve addressed here time and time again: narrative.

In my search, I have found that the blogs that really captured my attention have an innate sense of storytelling present. I don’t necessarily mean long written narratives about some meaningful event; it could be as simple as a short caption to an evocative photo, or a series of pictures showing a work in progress. My realization was that, in presenting the blogs we will choose to include in the magazine, we need to find the narrative core of each individual blog and put on paper, so that, yes, readers are willing to pay their $10 to bring it home so they can curl up with under the covers, just like they would a good novel.

Life is about stories, I tell ya. Even when you’re not expecting them, you find them shaping the world around you.

In order to urge on this confluence of the themes in my life — writing, art, narrative — I’ve decided to make a few changes around here. I’ve been keeping two blogs for some time now (three if you count the journal at my DeviantArt account) and I’ve begun to wonder if this division isn’t the reason why all of them suffer from neglect. It’s time, I think, to unify my public face by unifying my blogging efforts, to stop compartmentalizing my thoughts and create a more cohesive vision of myself. So from now on, all my blogging will be done here, at Artifacts, and I’ve installed a useful little plug-in that will forward all my posts automagically to my LiveJournal. And from now on, I won’t reserve this blog for only posts that suit my writerly interests; it’s going to be a cross-purpose journal, and hopefully that will mean it will get used more often.

I don’t know exactly where this is going to lead, or what might show up here in the long run, but I do know one thing: The big story is just getting started, folks! Stay tuned for the next chapter.

A long-imagined web project of mine has been The Book of Ten Queens, the first (very brief) chapter of which went up last winter. I never went any further with it because my original presentation concept meant I had to put together a second set of web graphics to go with the text of the second chapter. And since I wasn’t happy with any of my attempts at the graphics, I felt no inclination to work on the text either.

So I don’t have the excuse of graphics and web design to distract me from the writing, I’ve decided to incorporate the project into this journal instead. I’ll let the WordPress tools handle the organization and presentation for the time being, and maybe someday, when there’s enough text to justify it, I’ll spin it off into its own site once again. Meanwhile, Ten Queen posts here should be easily identifiable by the graphic you see in this post.

Inspired by a friend of mine, who has for several months been publishing a brief “Freaky Friday Fiction” in her blog, I’m going to attempt to write a new episode in the book each week. They won’t necessarily be written or posted sequentially, or even in completed episodes, but I’ll put up an index page to keep track of what goes where. Hopefully, this will allow me to start winding my way through the various stories that I have envisioned so far, and discover what other tales are waiting there to be told. Since today is Sunday, I’ll call Sunday my post day, and I’m going to cheat by posting what is already published on the original site. But I’m going to put up the nascent glossary, so the week won’t be wholly devoid of original content.

Enjoy!

I’ve just gotten through importing most of the posts from the Greymatter version of this site — there really wasn’t that much, and I skipped the more personal notes and site update type things. I don’t know if what I did bring over is of much interest to anyone, but I’d like to delete the Greymatter database from the server and I’d hate to just lose everything.

In other site news, a while back I installed the rather impressive (at least as far as my needs are concerned) Stat Counter web tracking software. The sweetest thing about the utility is that there is a WordPress plugin that installs it on every page for you, which makes it that much easier to track visitors throughout your site.

What the tracker tells me is that, once separated from the mind-boggling amount of traffic other parts of dumoski.com recieves (mostly, I think, spam bots and search engines pinging the largely unused family gallery and a non-functioning guestbook page), Artifacts only gets a couple of real hits a week. I thought I’d boost those hits a bit by registering my site with Technorati, but that has turned into a real bust. Whenever I try to “claim my blog” to begin the process, the function times out on me with a message that “we’re too busy right now, try again later.” A message to their help gurus went unanswered, as did my follow up request. I’m not impressed! So not impressed that I don’t think I’ll even add any links to the service from this post! Just call me a rebel.