On to the next big challenge...isn't that always the way of things ?

Current Mood : Mentally and physically wiped out - but almost satisfied. 

Whew ! At 10am this morning, after a solid two hours of deleting and checking, proofreading the checked boxes before hitting that 'delete' button, then checking the File Manager total disk space totals again, I got the Tripod site and blog down to 19.8mb. They say. My calculations show 16.8mb, but whatever. I found another file where every image I ever used - even stuff I erased years ago - had been backed up, often several times over. I had a merry time dumping that stuff, lemme tell ya. And if I hadn't, I'd still be trying to figure out where all that used space was. Kinda ticks me off if you want the truth - there really was no reason for me to click on that folder, since it was labelled Webon, some aspect of Tripod I've never used. And I quit deleting once I got it under 20mb, so I'm sure there's still acres of space that's tying up for no real reason save that I'm too wiped out to go through each and every file.

Anyway. I feel sorry for Somewhere That's Green, that poor site is gutted. There's only 11 pages, and that includes the Home one. But all the tutorials were saved, and I even kept a couple smaller pages, like the Midge Factor, due to request and just plain favoritism.

Tripod was not happy with me. Hadda jump through hoops to downgrade my service, but I did it. Sorry about the ads, but somebody's payin' somewhere - and I can't anymore. Right afterward, I went to PayPal and cancelled my monthly payment agreement with Tripod as well. They have no reason to hit my account when the usual bill comes due on the 11th. They always bill ahead, so I've already paid through this current cycle. Of course, despite changing it seven or twelve times, my site still shows as 'Plus', so if it still does tomorrow, I'll call to verify. You'd think an online company would know that a client wanted to downgrade their account after clicking through all the warnings and notifications several times throughout the day...

Forgive me for this, but I'm taking the rest of the day off. I should restore all those Catwalk Kitties, Barbie, Elphie, and the other really great images to Flickr, but I'm wiped out. All the Webon files were listed as alphanumeric sequences, so I had to click on them to see what they were, and I still have numbers and random letters flashing in my eyes when I blink.

On the social side of life... yesterday, I got tagged with a challenge on Flickr. My instructions were to photograph my dolls without changing anything, hit 'em exactly as they are. No hair brushing, no clothes changed - as is, where is. Post the photo(s) and ask five friends to join in. Now, to me, tagging is like watching other kids get tossed into the pool. Yeah, it seems kind of annoying, but deep down, you kinda hope someone pushes you in, too. So I was secretly (well, maybe not so secretly now ! (grin)) pleased, and took the challenge. I did crop all of 'em, and had to move Ghoulia and GB Cleo so I didn't need five photos. And I totally forgot Elphie and Fiyero, so I took four. I felt so included, so valued, if that makes any sense. And there's one of the photos, the gang in the living room. I really need to spend more time with them. Too many dolls have been in the same clothes for *years* while I focused on the next shopping trip, the next doll, the next whatever.

Time for me to change more than site providers ! 

Can't wait 'til the Tripod monkey business is over - and I am soooo close !

Current Mood : Eyestrained.

Current Image Notes : Ya can't be surrounded by images from your past and not get a bit nostalgic for a few of 'em...

Well, all the original blog photos are gone from the blog itself. I still have some 'photo not found' icons to ditch from back when I had to store the image on a photo album and post then link to the blog. Those things are a major pain to get rid of, so I'll delete them later. You know what's annoying ? Even if the image was already on Somewhere That's Green, I couldn't remote link it to appear on the blog as well. Nope. If I wanted the same image on the site and on the blog, I had to put it in two directories, and the blog one was saved in a third. And guess who's paying for all three chunks of space ? Plus, I've recently discovered that, if you posted 'ElphieBlouse.jpg' and decided it needed to be resized or something and deleted it, then posted 'ElphieBlouse2.jpg', so as not to confuse the image uploader, it'd save both. It never deleted the first one from disk space, just what the blog displayed. I'm not really surprised, it's actually to be expected, but no wonder you'd run out of space so quickly on the 'free' version.

On the original blog, I had to start a photo album - an option only available for paying members - save the image there, grab the URL and cut/paste it via the html editor. No remote linking at all, not even to other places you were paying for, like a website. It's stuff like that - and kludgy Tripod work-arounds, posting the same image numerous times and paying to store the image each time - that made me start looking around a couple weeks ago. Now I'm kinda glad we're broke, so I'm not payin' another ridiculous year of paying too much for too little space.

Today's efforts finished gutting the original blog as far down as it can be gutted and still exist. Disk space now rests at 42mb. Not bad, considering this whole business started at 153mb ! Still gotta get the combined site and original blog down to under 20mb, so tonight's your last night - if you really, really liked anything at all on Somewhere, go get it tonight, because I turn my blade on it tomorrow morning, about 8am Central time. And I don't stop until it's at 19.9mb. The earliest I can tell Tripod not to bill me, the less likely they are to do so anyway. Still, once I revert it to 'free' with Tripod and tell PayPal to cancel payments, that should do it. I'd love it if I could do that sometime tomorrow...

Beloved Hubby asked, after seeing me devote nearly all my available time to this little project, what I was gonna do when it was over. Shoot, I got a ton of photos to put up on Flickr, dresses to make and sell on Etsy, and some much-needed naps to take !

But right now, I have too many neglected dishes to catch up on. (sigh)

See ? I still have dolls that never had 'Monster High' embossed on their boxes ! (grin)

Current Mood : Dazed from deletions.

So far, I like Blogger ! It's been super-easy to use, and fun. Thanks for coming along !

Realized today that I made it through another month without buying any embroidery designs ! That's three months in a row, a full quarter of the year. Not too bad. I'm lucky that the one set I'd consider buying is too expensive, and nothing else has interested me in some time. And there's the whole 'no money' thing. Sometimes being broke is a great freedom. For one thing, we won't fall for any get-rich-quick schemes. We're too poor to get rich in any fashion !

It may sound petty, but since I'm not buying, I'm unsubscribing from a bunch of the embroidery design newsletters. I hardly ever read them, and feel guilty taking the freebies when I already have so much - tons of designs I'll never use. Yet my frugal (i.e., cheap and petty) nature still has me harvesting points for future use at the SiCK site, even though I got the two singles I wanted last month. At least it's not extravagant- it takes about 130 points to buy a single design most of the time, and the usual methods only yield 5 points per day.

Ya'll are gonna laugh at me, but I redid my whole desk to accommodate Frankie's mirror bed. And I still couldn't squeeze it in anywhere ! So I ended up cleaning off a nearby plastic cabinet and setting up a little display there. At least I got some of those dusty, hard-to-clean places behind my monitor cleaned up ! And the cabinet needed attention, too.

I also deleted most of 2009's blog images - still no change on the all-important disk space, and I was beginning to worry a bit. So I wrote the Tripod Club Blog, a sort of user-helping-user place, and asked where the images are actually stored, since I didn't see them anywhere in File Manager or any of my site files. Turns out they're stored under some server I've never heard of - not Tripod, not Trellix, not even Webon. Experimentally dumped a few images I knew I'd already erased off the pages, and that did it. The disk space went down almost immediately. Whew ! There for a while, I was starting to mourn the original blog, since I didn't see a way of keeping it.

And, since I'm erasing the photos in the blog editor, that means there won't be ugly, annoying little 'image not found' icons all over the place. Since it doesn't take long to delete the image from disk space, I'm gonna keep on deleting the images via blog editor, a year a day, and then dump them off the disk.

Won't you be glad when all this is over, and I go back to going on and on about the 38 new Monster High dolls being released next month ? Or soon, how the wonderful and cheap dresses I have up on Etsy aren't selling ? (grin) One way or the other, it'll be over and done with by the 10th, so it won't be much longer now ! Believe me, I'll be glad to call this finished, too.

Thought you might like to see Baby Crissy, since I talked so much about her yesterday. I love this little outfit. It came with cute little shorts to go over a diaper - her packaging proclaimed that she could wear real 9mos. baby clothes - brilliant marketing, I think ! -  but I've found clothes that fit her were marked anywhere from Newborn to 12mos. Guess babies are bigger now ! I used to have dozens of cute second-hand outfits for her, but I scaled it down when we moved. Her arm/body structure really requires a fully-open back, so it was easy to ditch the ones that were difficult to get on her. 

Baby clothes, especially shoes, are so inexpensive on the yard sale circuit that I've never made her anything but a simple nightgown - and the print was bright enough to keep an entire post-Thanksgiving feast family awake. Kinda wonder what GoodWill thought of it when they opened the donation bag. 

I'm ready for bed, too !

Current Mood : Slightly dazed, but I've nearly worked my way through the images of 2008 !

I've been testing and playing with Blogger so much, I forgot to tell ya'll - when a photo's a bit small on the entry, like today's, mouse over it. It'll be clickable if you wanna see it larger, but still small and cute if you don't. I noticed back in the original blog's early days, I mostly used small photos, and that was OK. They were big enough to see whatever I was yammering on and on about, and a larger one was usually on the site already. Kinda the same thing here. And I like not having huge photos on the blog. But if you want bigger, you can have it. It's the best of both !

You can also feed the fish ! Several sites I've seen have these, so I'm happy to have my own 'tank'. If you mouse over the tank, the fish will follow your cursor - just like real koi will follow a hand over their pond. I think they're all hoping to be fed ! Click on the tank, and small yellow pellets of chow will appear, and they sure love it !

And I forgot to list the link to the whole photo story of Frankie's new bed. ARrgh. See what mundane repetitive work does to my head ? I forget everything ! It's over here - http://flic.kr/s/aHsjuCzooA  .

Speaking of forgotten, I passed a pleasant hour today, brushing Baby Crissy's hair, cleaning some dust and the odd spot from her arms, and changing her clothes. I know she's been in that particular baby dress for over a year now, and it was dusty and dirty. She looks so pretty again ! I also straightened out Princess Dorrie and Prince Hubby - they've fallen over several times, and their hair had become messy. Since I was over there, I also brushed up My Size Barbie Gracie and Debbie, my brunette AG Battat clone. It felt so nice to spend time with them that I'm renewing my ambition to spend at least an hour a week with dolls who don't have monster attributes. Although a few minutes several times a week is preferable.

It's a nice break from all that repetitive photo deleting - it's really draggin' me down. About ten minutes in, I forget what I'm doing and have to repeat some efforts. What's worrying is that, when I check on my current useage, far as disk space, it remains exactly the same. I don't know if they only update sporadically or if all this effort is for nothing, and I'm gonna have to ditch the original blog wholesale. Gonna do all I can to avoid it, but like Michelle said, sometimes it's good to start fresh.

And it's always easier to do that when you have friends.