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.

It’s fun giving out these GMail invites. I’m getting to meet new people from all around the world because of this.

What a weekend it was. Birthday party for my mom and sister on Saturday, Father’s Day picnic on Sunday. Oh, and transcription running behind, so late nights too. Ariel was very funny at the picnic when we were leaving. She was in a kissing mood, so it was “Want kiss Papa, want kiss Grandma, want kiss boys,” at which point the boys all scattered. She and I chased one around a little, as she kept offering to kiss him. He was probably 5 or 6, and really didn’t want to be kissed, but loving the chase, as he made sure to not get too far away. She didn’t get to kiss him, but it was funny.

And now I have even more invites. If you’re looking for GMail invites, get over to my discussion board now and let me know! I’ll do a contest of some sort, probably post the most if I get enough interest, otherwise, it’s to the first 5 people, since that’s how many invites I have at the moment. I’ll decide soon what I’m doing with them, so get your name in the hat now! I’m hoping to do invites on Tuesday, June 22, so let me know quickly.

On a different note, it’s going to be quite a couple of weeks for me. My husband and I live with my sister (cheap rent), and she just informed me that early next week her countertops are going to be torn out, first step in getting them replaced. They will be gone for 2-3 weeks, then the new ones will be installed. It takes that long to make the new ones from the template made when the old are removed. We will have no stove or water in the kitchen during that time, so I’m going to be doing a LOT of cooking this weekend so we can live off the microwave as much as possible. Of course, there’s always the crockpot, my best friend sometimes, but that would be a pain to wash in the bathroom.

And when I went to notify the winners, I found out I had just enough GMail invites for all of them now. Go figure.

Next time, I think I’ll do a contest on the boards for them, assuming there is a next time. Post the most kind of thing, just very short. If you think you’d like to do that if it happens again, let me know. Just join the forums and either post your interest or PM me.

OK, going to pick the GMail winners now, so too late if you wanted one. No, I’m not going to announce names or anything

Well, my SEO efforts are at least getting some notice, if not much benefit yet. That’s the hardest part about search engine optimization – waiting for results. I’ve been tracking a few keywords, and I’m starting to see some results going waaay up and down, so with any luck things will stabilize for me soon. Not getting the precise results I want yet, but then the work at home and home business fields are highly competitive, so that doesn’t surprise me.

Ariel has certainly given me a big reminder to keep medicine out of reach. No, nothing like grabbing a bottle or anything, I’ve always been good about keeping such things out of her reach. She just loves the taste. She keeps coming up to me saying “more medcin, mommy” (that’s about the pronunciation). I’ve only been giving her medicine at bedtime so that she can sleep with the cough we all have here. It’s just about nothing during the day, and I see no point in overmedicating her or myself.

This is fun! I have 2 free Gmail invites to give away, which I have posted on my discussion board. I think I’ll pick who gets them tomorrow. I have 4 or 5 people already asking for them, so I think I’ll have to do a drawing or something to make it fair. Really should have made it more of a formal promo or something, you know, post the most or whatnot. But since I didn’t, I’ll just have to pick randomly.

What, you want a Gmail invite too? Well, if it isn’t June 17th yet, head on over to my Discussion Boards and ask! Who knows, you might just get it!