I’m about to start my work day again, in between laundry loads, checking the stove and feeding people. Looking up at my list on the whiteboard, I realized I juggle about 6 clients at once. A couple are long-term and the rest float in and out as things come up. I’m finally making some huge progress on some things, with a lot of it finishing up at the same time. There’s some vastly different sites I’ve been working on, all really cool implementations. Also? I think I’m getting used to saying “web developer” when someone asks me what I do.

You know, in addition to all that other stuff.

Havign said all that, when it comes to clients and other websites I work on, it’s much easier to start with an existing theme for wordpress and tweak around that. I’ve wanted to try out some premium themes for a while now, but don’t have the funds to do so. One designer, named Addi, is running a contest to give away a developer’s license for his themes - worth $500.

Can you imagine the havoc I’d wreak with that?

All I have to do is write and entry and link back to him and I’m entered in the contest. I could have put this over in my other blog, WPMU Tutorials, but I have some readers here who also may be interested, or just curious. Speaking of WordpressMU, I really want to try out one of the Original Premium News theme as a main blog page on WPMU-based system. I think it would work perfectly as a portal to the rest of the site and the member blogs. Actually, the rest of the themes make me think of all sorts of sites I could use them on…

Contest closes on my birthday too! I think that’s a sign.

For the Wordpress users in my audience, I have an interesting giveaway today. Small Potatoes is a great theme designer who recently started a paid theme club. Over the next year, he will release at least one new theme a month to club members. His themes are good. Really good - both in design and coding.

The best part? The theme club is only FIVE BUCKS.

Even better?

There’s a giveaway contest! But hold your clicks, you don’t have to go anywhere - I have FIFTY - that’s right, 50 - free memberships to give away. Leave me a comment saying how much you love new themes, and I’ll send you the details. Isn’t this awesome? Tell all your friends and link to me if you can to help get to word out.

And if he ever gets to this end of Canada, SP is already invited to stop in so I can feed him. Poor boy is too skinny, working so hard.

Note: if your blog is hosted at Wordpress.COM, you can’t upload your own themes there. not even with a paid upgrade. You need a self-hosted version of Wordpress to install more themes.

97% Geek

Busy day, busy night last night. More to coem as I play catch-up. (and I got up early, too)

Pop on through if you’re reading this in a feed somewhere, as I’ve tweaked the header again. This time? It’s ever-changing. It shows the latest twelve photos from our flickr stream in those cool square thumbnails.

Thanks to this flickRSS plugin, and Dale and Matt at Brave New Code for their minimalia theme that I snagged it from.

(Psst… Matt, if you ever see this, I’m the one who talked about being a Wordpress guru. And yes, I *am* slightly embarrassed about it now…)

NOTE: I managed to see what you guys are talking about when Ron looked at it in his profile. A HARD refresh fixed it. Your browser isn’t catching the stylesheets changes. If you still see the trees, that’s a tip. I remvoed the tree pic from the header, it’s not there anymore, so if you see it and the sqaure pics down the side, that’s why.  Press F5.

Over at the awesome educational gaming site Super Smart Games, they are running a series of posts on homeschooling and computer games. Intriguing, huh? I’m sure you know we love computer games, utilizing them in our children’s schooling, and I’ve always said that a well-designed game is educational in itself, no matter how fluffy it may seem to the parent, and…

Well, I wrote a whole article. You should go read it.  There’s even a picture of me not smirking like usual. Then you should poke around the rest of the site and bookmark it and stuff. Elle is my new bestest friend.

It’s come up recently in some circles about how a certain h0meschool blog awards is only accepting nominations for G-rated blogs. Now, I ran mine through a checker, but it comes back fast enough that I can assume it’s only checking the first page.

Because I know I used to be PG-rated. And yes my kids read. So in the interest of science, here’s some keywords that I have mentioned in the past (check the archives):

- breast feeding
- strip quilting
- butts and boobs
- female body parts like uterus and cervix. Oh, and boobs.
- sex
- groan-inducing food

If I think of more, I’ll add more.
ETA - I found these phrases:
dangerous
knives
sexual
fart
naked
pain
zombies
blood
death
kill

Now, I’m thinking if someone wanted to, they could probably comb through my extensive archives and find *something* objectionable to someone somewhere. But to me that would be the sign of someone taking virtual blog awards just a tad too seriously.

Son of Edit: I have now passed into PG territory with 1 use of the word “kill” on the main page. I would say I could kill for a piece of chocolate, but I have a stash right here in the desk drawer. So I don’t have to kill anyone.