This past weekend, I was able to finish up the redesign of The Girl’s web site, and it’s on display over at www.yayaprincess.com. The new design is a radical departure from here previous website, on the front and back ends. The most striking design change to the average reader is the change in layout, as seen below:

She loves her pink, and so we stuck with it, although we did use two different tones, to give primary areas more focus, and secondary areas a softer feel. I think it turned out nicely.

The more advanced among you will be interested in knowing what changes that we made under the hood. The Girl was running an old version of Expression Engine to manager her blog. Expression Engine is a great content management system for bloggers, and some really great designers, such as Veerle Pieters, use it to create and publish beautiful websites. Two problems existed with The Girl’s installation of Expression Engine, however, and those were: a) As I mentioned before, it was a very old version of the software, and b) I don’t know the first thing about Expression Engine and how to write and edit code for it. So the first major change that we made to The Girl’s site was to move it over to my hosting account, after some undesirables had their way with the old site, to be hosted on my server, and the second major change that we made was to install Wordpress. Simple, stable, reliable, free Wordpress. After the installation we picked a template that The Girl could tolerate until the new site was completed, and I got right down to work.

I have to say that I had been bugging the girl for quite a while to let me redesign her page, and so I had worked up a new design in Photoshop that I really liked. I had gotten a few “Oh, that’s nice” comments thrown my way when she would take the time to glance at it, but nothing concrete. And so I knew that I had a design to implement, and with The Girl going off to far away places to work for a week, I knew I had my time to strike.

I quickly began adding plugin after plugin to the Wordpress installation, which I normally don’t do. I will say this for the Wordpress community, it is vast, but it can also be quite unstable. For those that don’t know, Wordpress is an Open Source software. What this means is that it can be developed by anyone. What this actually means, aside from the above, is that anyone can develop anything that they want for Wordpress. Plugins can be great additions to a site, easy to download and install, or they can be utter and complete @#%&!, unsuitable for use. The latter was the case for a couple of different functions that I found plugins for, but eventually everything was up and running smoothly.

I decided to veer from my normal course of action on this project for two reasons. The first, and I suppose foremost, is that the site had to be usable for The Girl. For the most part sites that I’ve designed in the past have been put together to be updated and changed by me, or by someone with the same level of knowledge, or greater, that I have when it comes to coding. In this case it’s different, and I would hope that The Girl would be the first to agree with that statement. She wants to be able to add quotes that she likes to her page, or pictures to her posts, or a page about her, or a page with links to books she’s read, and she wants to be able to do so with a limited, or nonexistant knowledge of HTML or CSS. And honestly, such is not an unreasonable request. So the first reason was to make it easier to use, for her. The second was to make it easier, for me. I’ll be updating my own site very soon (probably as we speak), and one of the things that I wanted to do with my own newest redesign was to make the every day usage of the site easier, so that I am inclined to want to interact with it more. In the past, I’ve always just performed a lot of the most common functions that you see on a blog outside of the blogging software. Why? Because I could. But it’s certainly no less easy to code this way. And it’s no less time consuming. So I’ve come to the conclusion that things ought be done not because they can be done, but rather because they need be done.

With that said, I seem to think the new design of her site is a big improvement for her, regardless of the new look. The site is more functional, it allows for more ease of use, and a broader range of content. That’s what a personal site is really about isn’t it. To express as much as you can, or at least as much as you want to, to other. So that those that know you may follow along with a sly smile of remembrance as a story is told of which they were a part, or so that those that you don’t may begin to, in whichever way you please. Either way, I hope that The Girl enjoys the new palette that she has been given, on which to paint the portrait of her world.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of work by or about Willie Morris lately, I honestly don’t know. But there was something about sitting in Central Park’s Great Lawn on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, with the sun shining on us, completely alone in a city of twenty million. The Girl and I lay on our Ole Miss blanket, her snacking and people watching, my head in her lap as I read Larry L. King’s words about Willie, that helped me to understand even more the man’s motivation in his actions, his concern over the complications of being a southern expatriate, and his desire, and eventually his will, to go home again.

I think that the reasons that I’ve become so wrapped up with the works of Willie Morris over the past few years are the same reasons that most people follow the careers of great writers. Aside from the obvious entertainment value derived from reading quality works of literature, the work of certain great writers help us to define in a way who we are, by describing who they are; putting into words the emotions and realizations of shared circumstance, albeit decades apart. No one who has grown up in the south and eventually moved away can read from or about Willie Morris and not be struck by at least a passing familiarity to their own situations.

One difference between Willie and I stands out glaringly to me, however, and brings me to my eventual point. Willie Morris, for the majority of his adult life, struggled to find a loving soul to play counterpoint to his. Once he found his soul’s match in JoAnne Prichard Morris he was finally complete as a writer, and a man. The difference between Willie and I is that I have had the world’s luck in finding my counterpoint some two-odd decades earlier than he, and as I sat in Central Park on that sunny Saturday and contemplated such things, I was happy in the thoughts that the Good Old Boy would have loved The Girl.

Allison, you truly are my counterpoint. In much the same way that you allow me to be your advisor, you are my inspiration. I strive, every day, to become the man that I should be, for you. You keep me focused, and grounded, and still allow me to have my fun, as all boys will sometimes. You have saved my life, and I can no longer imagine it without you.

I love you.

…is how I would describe my absence from Southbound Home for what’s been almost two months now. The Girl would will probably freak out to hear me describe it as such, but I don’t mean to say that moving in with her is an unfortunate event. Quite the contrary, so far, actually. What I’m talking about are those things that turned my expected two week absence into the six weeks that it finally ended up being.

The move was rough, but it wasn’t any worse than any other move that I’ve ever made. Moving just always sucks, no matter how much stuff you have, or who helps you, and I’ll never be convinced otherwise. After that though, it was just one thing after another holding me up from doing any sort of maintenance on the site, including:

1. A redesign gone terribly wrong,
2. A Valentine’s Day trip to the Emergency Room,
3. A new apartment full of boxes that nobody seemed to want to acknowledge,
4. A broken computer, lost in transit,
5. A freakish back injury incurred while bathing,
6. The Girl’s first major work function taking her away from me for longer than I can safely manage on my own,
7. And a small bout of Tendinitis.

Will I explain all of these things. Maybe, possibly. But it could take me the rest of the year to describe everything that’s gone on in the last two months. I might gloss over some of it and hit the high points. More than likely I’ll just describe it in passing in the next few posts. I want to concentrate on the future, and mine and the girls lives going forward. I’m gonna focus on the major changes though, that living with a real live girl entail, and so the last two months are important in that respect. Stay tuned.

It was time for an upgrade. Life 1.5 was treating me just fine; it was stable, it was familiar, and it provided me with everything that I thought I needed, and I was generally happy with the product. Life 1.5 provided many great features to me as a user, such as the ability to eat anything that I wanted for dinner, hours upon hours of video games at my discretion, binge drinking, and Saturdays spent on the couch. Interestingly enough, Life 2.0 still has many of these same features included, but with a variety of extra features not found in past versions.

In all seriousness, to put things mildly, I’m very happy with my version of Life right now. It’s rather funny how life works sometimes. You plan for a change, and you try in some way to affect a change in your own life, but then you often don’t realize the extent of that change, as it relates to your entire life, in the very moment that the change occurs. Hell, sometimes you don’t realize it for years, or ever. But a change, a big change, a profound change, can cause ripples in your life, changing your life in more ways than you originally intended. Change begets change, if you will, and the next thing you know, your version of Life barely resembles the one that you were using a few short months ago. Maybe it’s because this change in your version of Life changes your personality, or maybe it’s because it simply just changes your perspective on the world. Who knows, but you certainly don’t view the people that you interact with and the situations that you find yourself in the same as you did before, that’s for sure.

Life 2.0 is Peer-to-Peer programming, and sharing with other users abounds. Through its enhanced functionality, your use of Life 2.0 might actually improve or upgrade the versions of Life used by your peers. Your boss may have more free time based on your increased responsibility and drive at work; a significant other might see their version of life upgraded as well, as they begin to care for you in the same way that you care for them. The enhanced functionality purposely allows each user to experience Life differently.

So as I sit in a first class seat on a non-stop flight from San Diego, CA to Charlotte, NC, returning from one of the best weekends that I have experienced in quite some time (which is a story that I will share some other day in the near future), I contemplate when it is that I will next need to upgrade my version of Life. Life 3.0 includes a diamond ring, and the ability to search for florists. Life 3.5, dubbed a mini-upgrade, involves strollers and carriages, and a college trust fund, and it packs a mighty big punch for the price. Life 4.0 is nicknamed ‘Retirement’, and it involves much less work to get it operating, and is very easy to use.

Regardless, I like the program. It suits me. Most definitely, it’s better than Death 1.0, which is never in need of an upgrade. You’ve heard what they say about Death 1.0, right? It’s like Internet Explorer. Nobody really wants it, but you can’t get rid of it, and you eventually end up having to use it for something.