wavesoflife

It’s definitely an addiction. I’m now up to 14 domains that I currently own. I bought prehistoric-creatures.com and sea-creatures.net.

At least I have a head start on material for sea-creatures.net. Back in 2005, for my final project I did a non-fiction children’s book and website for a children’s education program for a fictional aquarium. (See my final project presentation). Some of the illustrations are pretty good, such as the clownfish, but many will have to be improved. I was working on this project when I got very sick and ended up in the hospital, so I’m still surprised I even managed to finish it on time.

I’m excited about my three creature sites and am looking forward to working on them all.

No matter how many domains I own, I still get a kick out of purchasing a new one and seeing my new URL.

Today I bought mythical-creatures.net. I keep saying that if I just had more content on mysticalcreatures.org, I could make a good bit of money off ads and things on there. But I just don’t have the energy for the type of content I want on there. I want to do it as if it were a textbook from a Harry Potter type world where mythical creatures are real and I want to use my own artwork. This is going to take awhile to do. I’ve had some ideas though for some other things I’d like to do with it and that’s where the new domain comes in. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do exactly, but I want to have a blog and reviews of books and things. And I’m hoping to make a little bit of money off it. It will be an experiment in monetization for me. Plus new domain = fun.

BTW, oceanbreeze.net was 10 years old in April. Wow. Wavesoflife will be 10 in October.

Today is Delurking Day ‘09. I don’t really think that there’s anyone who reads this that I don’t know about. But if you’re reading this and I don’t know you already, say hi! You can say hi too if I already know you.

I lurk a lot on other people’s weblogs and am not unlurking on any today (and yet I’m asking people to delurk…). On the sites where a lot of people comment already, I don’t comment because I feel like my comment will be lost in the midst of all the others. And on the sites where only one or two people comment, I feel like I would be intruding if I commented. And sometimes there’s such a community on the comments where the comments all know each other that I feel like I couldn’t break into that community. And I don’t comment because I like I’d comment and there would be no acknowledgement that I commented.

Which is something I’m very guilty of. Random people have commented here before. I always visit their sites, but didn’t always leave a comment, or reply to their comment on my site.

I’ve never been a big replier to comments, although I’m trying to be better. The new threaded comments feature in WordPress makes it easier. I used to have a threaded comments plugin years ago, but then I guess I upgraded WP and the plugin broke or something.

So hi, all three or four people who still read this blog.

I finished a new layout tonight. The photo in the header is one I took in Jamaica, when we were there for our wedding. I still need to reorganize the sidebar and do all the other things I plan to do. The journal and gallery sections are under construction. Version 22 was an inspiration for this layout. I really hope it doesn’t take too long to load for anyone…the transparent pngs were somewhat large.

I need to find a different lightbox. I’m not thrilled with the one I’m currently using, but the other ones I looked at had problems in WordPress 2.7. I might just add one manually. Lightboxes load so slowly on my Powerbook on Firefox 3. I might have to switch to Safari…they load fine there.

I’m a lot happier with this layout than with my other recent ones. It feels more me.