Yzabel / July 20, 2012

One Lovely Blog Award

1. Thank – my nominator and link back to the site.

My thanks go to Tiffany for nominating me for this award! (And also Jenifer)

2. Share – 7 things about myself

  1. I dye my hair so often that I don’t even remember what my natural hair colour is.
  2. I have a tattoo of a winged Ouroboros on my left upper arm.
  3. I like eating durian.
  4. I’ve been playing pen & paper RPGs since 1995.
  5. I can go for ~48 hours without sleep.
  6. I like reading books about the English language. For pleasure, not only for school.
  7. Whenever I buy or receive a bok, I always sniff its pages. I love the smell of paper.

3. Nominate 7 other blogs

In alphabetical order:

4. Inform the nominees linking back to this post so they know the rules (who, by the way, have every right in the world to decline).

Yzabel / December 28, 2006

A Few Changes a-coming

A quick update to announce two things:

  • I’ve had this in mind for some time already, and I’ve finally taken a decision: I will progressively ‘get rid’ of my WordPress blog about writing. I will probably use it again later on for other purposes, and I’m not deleting the articles currently on it, but I won’t update it anymore. Since October this year, I’ve been posting my NaNoWriMo and other writings progression on a LiveJournal, and as much as this can seem ‘unprofessional’, the fact is that 1) I’m not published yet anyway, 2) what’s the point of detailing my antics as an aspiring author if nobody ever sees more than a few paragraphs of what I’m writing, 3) I don’t want to post full excerpts publicly, not yet.I’m not a huge fan of LJ when it comes to such a blog, but at least, there, I have full control on what accounts can and can’t access my posts. Sorry for those who don’t have a LJ account. A good half of the entries will be public, probably–just not the ones containing excerpts, or going into my plots in detail).
  • I know the layout here on the Y Logs is slightly off. I’m not sure when this problem has appeared, given how little time I’ve had to look into the matter. Before doing anything, though, I first need to update my version of WP and perform a database save–and the latter being a problem at the moment, I may not be able to do that in the next day or so.

Voilà, that’s all for the moment.

Yzabel / December 22, 2005

Holidays Season

Things are becoming speedy now, what with preparing Christmas, finishing the last-moment gifts, wrapping said gifts, managing the food supplies, and related activities. I’m not going anywhere this year to see family (family comes to me) or to spend the holidays (money will be kept to finance a laptop… or more likely the next batch of taxes to pay), so I’m supposed to have time to write, but let’s not fool myself, I also won’t want to spend Christmas Eve thinking about the next blog entries to write.Therefore, blogging will be slow in days to come, or may consist in short posts only. I’m not gone, just enjoying the winter’s break.Happy holidays everyone (and whatever other wishes fit with the various countries/places/religions/beliefs) 🙂blogging, christmas, holidays

Yzabel / December 21, 2005

Launching The Vectorized Blog

Here’s a blog project I haven’t advertised heavily, since I first wanted to start it and see if I could get it going for more than just a few days. The answer to this being a definite yes, I’m therefore proud to announce that Vectorized is alive and kicking, and that everyone is of course invited to go and take a look at it, if the theme remotely interests you, that is.

So what’s the theme? Illustrations and animations done in vector-based software such as Illustrator, Freehand or Flash. What’s often called “vector art”, for reasons of convenience, is used in advertising and logo-making, among other fields, due to the scalability of the images it produces. I’ve even written entries there on what vector art is and what vector art isn’t. I use this media a lot myself in my illustrations, and I’ve come to realize that there weren’t many blogs dedicated to it (in fact, I found one only, and a handful of “personal” blogs which creators put their own works on). My resolve was strengthened. I decided to launch the blog.

The template itself isn’t totally fixed yet, but this is something I’m working on as well.

Yzabel / December 20, 2005

Performancing Extension For Firefox

I admit it, I’m an extension junkie, and I lay my hands on whatever gets out for Firefox. Nothing surprising, then, to the fact that I grabbed the Performancing extension, which allows you to blog about a page in a split window within your favorite browser (well, alright, my favorite browser). Currently testing it to write this very post, I must say that so far, it’s proved quite an interesting add-on, and worth the try, if only because one doesn’t need to bother with pop-up windows or, worse, leaving the web page one’s blogging about.

I can’t say yet how it’s going to behave with different kinds of blogs, but at least on WordPress.com and right now here on WP 1.5, it seems to be working well enough.

So, the word is out, if you want it, grab it here: Performancing for Firefox (Firefox 1.5; aye, kids, you need to upgrade from time to time).blogging, extension, firefox, performancing, wordpress

Yzabel / December 15, 2005

FYI: Yzabel.Net

A few months ago, I gave in and got a domain name with, well, my pen name in it, and found myself facing the following problem: what to do when you have a brand new Yzabel.net to deal with, but nothing to put on it? Granted, this webspace has been put to use for more than only a handful of pages (I direct other domain names to these, is all), but it was the entrance one, the index.html, that I didn’t know what to do about. I contemplated migrating my illustrations site, but what for? Paradygma does very well where it is now. A writing site, maybe? Sure, but what to put on it? I can’t afford to give away first print rights on everything I write, and if it’s to publish a couple short stories only, it’s not really worth it.Thus, for anyone who’d be interested, Yzabel.net will, for the time being, feature announcements regarding my available blogs, websites, updates, and the likes (yes, including Paradygma). I figured out it might be easy enough to keep everything in one place this way.You can start stalking me now.blogging, internet

Yzabel / December 9, 2005

Free Blog Hosts

Not that I need any myself, but I thought this list of free blog hosts could be interesting. Since I’m a user of WordPress, and since I consider it like a pretty good platform, here’s in excerpt a list of hosts that function with the WP system:http://www.wordpress.comhttp://www.blogsome.com/http://weblogs.us/http://www.wpblogs.com/http://www.blogthing.com/http://globbo.org/http://www.theblog.cc/http://learnerblogs.org/http://uniblogs.org/http://edublogs.orghttp://hrblogs.org/http://beblogger.com/http://www.evilsupergenius.net/Personnally, among all of these, I use WordPress.com, and for one blog only, so I can’t really tell more about the rest. As they’re free, though, nothing prevents anyone from trying them, then switching to another one if it doesn’t strike one’s fancy.(Via BlackhatSEO and The Blog Herald.)blog, blogging, free, host, wordpress

Yzabel / November 25, 2005

WordPress and Blogger

I can’t quite remember now on whose blog I had seen this mentioned; I know it can’t have been more than two or perhaps three weeks ago. Anyway, for whoever would need this information: there’s an option, in WordPress 2.0’s beta, that allows you to import posts from Blogger to WordPress. This can be quite useful if you want to move to WP, but cringe at the idea of copying/pasting all your old posts manually. Note that this is what I did, back in February, when I moved by Second Life blog to WordPress… It was terribly boring, I tell you. And I didn’t even have that many posts to start with.I’ve tested the feature on two old little blogs I had set up a couple years ago for a SWG character that I never got to finish (since I’ve decided to not try the game in the end) and for another MMORPG-related project. The points I’ve been able to note down so far are:Read More

Yzabel / November 23, 2005

Thank Your First Commenter Day

Neil at Citizen of the Month suggests that Thanksgiving should also be First Commenter Day, which, all in all, I find a nice idea. Who would we be, we bloggers, without our readers and commenters, who so kindly let us know what they think of our constant babble and opinions?

Today, it is all about GIVING THANKS.How can we thank our fellow BLOGGERS? We read each other, we help each other with our designs and templates, and we cry on each other’s shoulder when a “blog crush” goes sour. On Thanskgiving, we should THANK our fellow bloggers.When I first started blogging, I was like a Pilgrim who just landed on Plymouth Rock. I was isolated and alone. For weeks, I wrote this blog without any direction or confidence in my ability. And then he appeared — like the Native American with his corn — my first commenter!

And my own thanks go to Larys, currently exiled on this small corner of a big isle that is Northern Ireland, and blogging about her experiences there on Many Shades Of Green. She actually has the honor of being the first commenter on both versions of this blog, since at the time, it was still one and only webpage.(Via The Blog Herald)blogging, comments, Thank+Your+First+Commenter+Day

Yzabel / November 21, 2005

WordPress News

A little dose of news regarding the WordPress platform:1) WordPress.com goes live, at least for the time being. If there’s anyone in this world who hasn’t an account there yet, you can go and sign up without having to receive an invite first. From Matt Mullenweg’s blog:

We’ve decided to open up WordPress.com for signups without invites for a bit. The service has been scaling very well since we got the problems from the move worked out. With that done and WordPress 2.0 in its final stages, there is a lot more time to focus on some cool features and common requests for WP.com now. (The design there has been updated, but is still just a placeholder.)

2) WordPress 2.0 is in its beta stage now. I haven’t tested it myself yet, although I may do that tonight if I happen to take a break from writing after the “good job” I performed yesterday. From what I’ve seen of it so far at Looce Tech News, the administration panel is the same as the WordPress.com’s one, which isn’t as pleasant as the Tiger panel, but is way better than the old WP interface. If you want to test it as well, head to this page to grab the downloadable archive. Beware, this is still a beta, so as usual with any upgrade, back up your database first!blogging, wordpress