My name is Benjamin. I come from the UK (although I was born in New Zealand) and I have been described as having a ginger personality. Whatever that means. I assume they're referring to my hair and my Ronald Weasley nature. Aside from that, I'm the only male blogger worth knowing.

You can thank Amber for that lovely introduction, but you deserve much more than just a small paragraph showing my nutty nature, therefore if you do wish to find out more, please visit the
about page.

07/04/2007
Everyday, Geek

What happened here?!

Prepare yourself, this is going to be a long blog entry.

First of all, if you tried to visit my website within the last 24 hours, you might have noticed it wasn’t working, and there was nothing here. That was simply because I changed hosts to Holdfire Network, which is actually run by a girl I met on Snark Forums. She gave me a really nice deal, and I was getting fed up with Hostony and their high prices. I was pay $142 a year for my hosting package, and I barely used all the bandwidth etc. So I have buckled down to a nice and cosy package which barely cost’s me anything and with a great company.
Jordan of course had some problems with the transfer, because I was picky and wanted solipsus.com seperated from winged-hope.com. Previously, when I bought solipsus.com, it was added to winged-hope.com as an addon domain so all the databases were together etc, but she did an amazing job!

When my website was down, I got thinking and after a comment from someone at Design Snack, I felt my layout is pretty boring, and the amount of font’s I use is horrible. So I am currently making a new layout! This one is going to be totally different, and is going to have alot of snazzy features, like Current Menu Linking (which means that the page you are on appears differently on the menu) and an extra menu which will change depending on which section of the website you are on. I am still debating whether this will be worth it, but I think it will be good to have.

CSS Naked was a success. I logged on in the morning of April 5th and still found my CSS on the layout, because I was silly and forgot to add some coding to my header to activate the plugin. Oppps!
Whilst my CSS was down, a couple of friends and I were talking on Snark and got to talking about accessibility on websites through mobiles, PDA and text-only versions. So I am going to be also trying to make Solipsus more accessible by adding more links which are hidden using CSS etc. Things are looking up aren’t they?

My real life isn’t going very well at the moment. I am on Easter holidays, supposedly revising for my May exams, but I just can’t get into the whole revision thing. I am going to try on Monday to get revision done and start to do all my homework so that I am up to date when I go back to school on the 17th.
Why is my real life not going very well at the moment? Well my dad is having problems with the business in respect to money issues and therefore putting stress on him and my mum. This is now developing into hourly arguments and at one point I thought I heard my dad say he was going to leave my mum. Great thing to hear when it is 1 week before their 26th year anniversary! T.T
But they seem to be better this evening, and they are talking about going to see a marriage counselor.
I really hope they don’t split up.
Also, in regards to a car, because of these money issues, I probably won’t be getting a car for a while. My parents are getting a loan, and they think they will be able to buy a car in about 2 weeks, but I am not getting my hopes up.

Ben

Bubs
08/04/2007

I absolutely love Design Snack, but sometimes those people don’t know what they are talking about :mad:

Can’t wait to see the new layout!

Jack
08/04/2007

I know what you mean about revision — I always felt that way about studying too, like, either I know it or I don’t and I don’t feel like revising is really going to help except to make me nervous.

Sounds like you’re working on a lot of the things I want to start thinking about in design too. I’ll have to keep an eye on you and see how it works out. :)

Faith
08/04/2007

I LOVE it, it looks awesome but in MSN Explorer your navigation encroaches on your content something scary. Might wanna look into that, I had to open Firefox just to bitch at you about it, lol. :x

Ben
08/04/2007

Thankyou faith. But everything should be fixed now! :)

Faith
08/04/2007

Lookin’ good from MSN Ex! :D

Sigrun
08/04/2007

This looks great :D I really like the color combination, it’s not a combination you see that often. I hope your parents won’t split up either. Divorces are a bitch, my parents divorced when I was 13. Maaaybe you could write an tutorial on current menu linking? (if you didn’t get it from somewhere else though.) Oh and btw, my cat is lying on the edge of my desk. He just lay down there for the heck of it XD He’s so weird. :P

Anjela
09/04/2007

I was planning on changing to Holdfire, but their prices are a tad expensive for me right now. I’m moving to tehlove.org instead, so hopefully the transfer process goes nicely.

I’m giving myself the whole Easter long weekend before starting my uni work again. That way I get a nice little break, and hopefully feel more inspired to do my work, since I’ve been doing it non-stop for six weeks now.

Hopefully things work themselves out with your parents. My boyfriend’s parents, and then a friend of mine’s parents split up in the past two years, it made me feel sad because I could see they’re sad.

I hope you are able to get a car, having that kind of freedom made me feel so much happier, because I didn’t have to factor two hours travelling time to get anywhere.

Amber
09/04/2007

I can’t read your comments, by the way. I’m not sure what happened there. The alignment of them is out too. This new theme looks pretty. What with everybody making their own these days I realise that I should stop being lazy and get out my rusty design skills. I lack the motivation required though. :P

It’s pretty. I think there should be a bit more contrast between the background colour though and text. And I don’t like how the little ‘welcome’ is centred. But other than that I think it’s a really, really, good improvement. I’m impressed.

(You should link your Valid XHTML/CSS up to a validator by the way.)

Ben
09/04/2007

Sorry Amber, but I was just implementing a new commment style and it seemed to mess up with the font colour. But all is done now! :D

Thankyou for the feedback. I agree with you about the background colour and text, so I have made it brighter. I hope this is better for you guys. It is for me at least. :P
I have also none-centered the welcome message. It was botering me too.

The Valid XHTML and CSS is on my to-do list. I originally did not link to them because on the CSS link, I was getting a link error saying it could not find my style sheet. Oh well. :P

Melissa
09/04/2007

I *heart* your new layout design, Ben! YAY! :D

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