Hee, hee, hee, I got one of those ebay scam pages taken down. Obvious novice, since the link didn’t look anything like it went to ebay… ebaysomethingorother.tripod.com. Come on now, how easy was that to get shut down. Contacted eBay, contacted Tripod, poof, the site is gone! I hope no one fell for it.

I made a quick addition to the Bookstore. At home parents can now share what products they like. Hopefully this will make the bookstore more interesting to visitors and make it into something of a resource as well.

Aaaannnnddd….

The Bookstore is DONE! I did a lot of tweaking to get it to look more or less how I wanted it to. There are still changes I would like to make, but I don’t know enough PHP to make them. Still, if you shop at Amazon anyway and want to support this site, head on over and check it out. The selection should be exactly as you would get at Amazon itself, as are the prices.

I made a change in the navigation within the bookstore, simply because I couldn’t stand that the original version had no easy way to move between categories short of using the Back button. So I moved the navigation for the rest of the site down to the bottom, and the side nav is now just for the bookstore. I changed the color to make the difference more apparent. I hope it isn’t too confusing for anyone, but it was the only clean solution I could think of.

Well, the fair was a blast. Ariel loved going on the rides, but just about threw a fit when she didn’t get to ride the dragon on the carosel. We took her down the BIG slide too, which she thought was wonderful. We’re thinking about going back on Thursday, because that’s pay one price day for rides.

She’s being so cute right now. My sister gave her a toy flower that’s about 5 feet tall. She’s running around saying “giyup, giyup” and straddling it.

I’m so excited! My husband has an interview for a really great job. It would mean a move, but he’d be working a lot at home too, which would be very interesting.

Phew, the bookstore is almost done! It should be today or tomorrow, depending on how much time I can steal to work on it.

The bookstore is looking GOOD now to me. I have the pages split out how I want them; now I just need to work a bit on the content of the main pages. Featured items and so forth. Then maybe I can figure out the mod-rewrite to ensure the search engines like me, and I’ll be in good shape with this. I’m still holding off on the launch because the pages look too odd to me yet with so little information on them, just navigation things on the main pages.

I spent about 45 minutes this morning assembling a tricycle for Ariel this morning. She’s been begging for a bike for weeks now, so naturally once it was assembled and outside she didn’t want anything to do with it. That’s kids for you, I guess. She sat on it every chance she got when I was working on it, of course.

We’re going to the Del Mar Fair tomorrow. It’s always lots of fun, and this year Ariel should be able to go on a couple of the kids rides, which should be interesting. Nothing like fair food.

Whee! I almost have a functioning Amazon bookstore on the site! Once it’s working I’ll put links to it, but I may be tweaking it for a while yet. I really don’t like the default index; I’d rather have the categories go to a page of subcategories so that I could have featured products on each page. I have no idea how to do that, as I really don’t know php, but I may decide to try and figure it out. I’m stubborn! I’ve done a fair amount of tweaking already to make it fit in my template, which it doesn’t quite do just yet. I have to figure out how to force the matter a little. It’s not generating all of the correct tags (some of the coding is very sloppy, but hey, it was free), so I’m having to figure out how to fix all of that. While I may not know php, I have studied other programming languages, so I can read it reasonably well and get the logic of how to add things in reasonably well.

Then comes SEO on that part! I would love to be able to put in just a bit of my own content on some of the pages, the category pages at the very least, and make it more search engine friendly. Have to see if I can figure out how to do a mod-rewrite, which should make the urls appear to be static rather than dynamic. It’s going to be a lot of work, but between having lots of extra pages available and the potential for income, I think the work will be well worthwhile.