sarah. word.

I like to party.

I started tumblelogging a little over a year ago because I liked Tumblr and thought it was the perfect place to post all the small stuff that wasn't lengthy and/or intellectual enough (HA! HA! HA!) to post here.

Problem is, now I find myself constantly having to choose between here and there when posting content, and it's getting confusing. I don't like having two blogs, and my guess is that you 1) don't like it either, 2) didn't even know I had a tumblelog, or 3) are my mom and read both religiously.

Can you advise how best to consolidate the glory that is my brain into one place?

Until then, I remain,
Madame Multiplicity

Keywords Are Like a Box of Chocolate...

Sometimes when I've run out of other things to do, I comb through my Google Analytics stats. Which are consistently both eye-opening and confounding. 

For example, anyone who types in "sarah lane", "sara lane", "shara lane", and various forms of "xp hacks" will eventually reach this blog. But in the past 30 days, a modest number of surfers also found me using the following specific search terms:

• "sarah lane fired" - 61
• "ooooooh" - 38
• "scotch" - 37
• "catfight haven" - 33
• "jennifer schwalbach smith playboy" - 33
• "tunok tunok" - 22
• "the word hi" - 21
• "phun girls" - 20
• "download geico caveman commercial" - 18

I'd attempt to make sense of it all, but where's the fun in that? Oh, and in case you were wondering, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith is director Kevin Smith's wife. Which explains so much.

DNS, Subdomains, and Mapping, Oh My!

Several years ago, I started up this blog right around the time I acquired the domain of my own name. Back then, I had zero experience with the Domain Name System (DNS) and didn't really understand the difference between mapping a domain and redirecting from one domain to another. So I asked the advice of a very geeky friend.

"Stick with redirects, " he said. "Domain mapping can be a tricky thing. There are 500-page books out there about DNS."

Clearly my very geeky friend did not feel like helping me that day, and I didn't want to read a 500-page book about DNS, so I steered clear of domain mapping altogether. Once I switched over to Typepad, all that really meant was that when you visited my website, instead of seeing 'sarahlane.com' in the URL, you saw 'sarahlane.typepad.com'. It didn't bother me.

But then it started to bother me a little. As I've joined more services and acquired more blogs over the years, it's begun to make a lot more sense why people want to organize as much of their online life as possible under the umbrella of a single domain. It's like branding yourself well.

After thinking long and hard about it for five minutes, I decided to map the subdomain 'blog.sarahlane.com' to this Typepad blog, map the subdomain 'tumblelog.sarahlane.com' to my Tumblr tumblelog, and leave my domain 'sarahlane.com' unmapped and free to use as I please. In theory, these tweaks aren't a big deal. A few CNAME entries and I should have been good to go. But the issues began when I started making DNS changes with my registrar when I should have been making them with my web host (consider using your registrar as your web host if you have issues with organization. Seriously). I won't go into the gory details of my personal DNS hell, but let's just say tech support people sometimes withhold very important information for no explicable reason at all (I mean clearly they're bored and resentful having to read 500-page books about DNS all day, but still). Every time I incorrectly updated my name servers, my server went down. Server, server, server. If you look at the word 'server' long enough, it really becomes ridiculous, doesn't it? SER-VER.

The beauty of DNS is that depending on where in the world you are, DNS changes can take between 12-72 hours to reach you. So a lot of my tech support phone calls sounded very similar to the following exchange:

• Me: Ok, I did what you asked. My site is still down. What's going on?
• Them: Mmmm... yeah. I can pull up your site just fine. So. Yeah.
• Me: Trust me, I can't. I would not lie about something like this.
• Them: Yeah, well. DNS... Propagate... Server... Caching... Flushing... Wait 48 hours.

I'm currently unemployed, which in many ways is a very positive thing. I get to eat all day in my pajamas and I rarely have to bathe. It's kind of awesome. But I'm also glued to my computer all day every day writing, editing, looking for work, and so on. I really can't wait for 48 hours for my website to magically reappear, especially after I've just emailed about four thousand people the link to my resume. 48 hours is like looking across a vast sea of infinite nothingness. I dislike the rules of DNS very much.

As of this afternoon my site's back up, so I'm going to stop crying and consider taking a shower. My mail server has also taken a beating, so if you sent me an email anytime in the past five days, I have probably not received it, and may never receive it. I'm sure it was a good email though. Well, unless you're Brad from Australia. I don't know what's up with that guy.

Let's Never Buy Toilet Paper Again!

Got a cool tip from Leo's Jaiku feed today: Amazon Subscribe and Save. It works well for grocery items you find yourself regularly stocking up on, like vitamins, or baby diapers, or razors, or toilet paper - things you know you'll need, and don't want to run out of.

According to Amazon, the benefits include:

• A delivery schedule that fits your needs--every one, two, three, or six months
• Discounts on our everyday price, whether you subscribe for a single month or for years
• Free shipping
• E-mail reminders of upcoming shipments
• The flexibility to change your schedule or cancel at any time

What's nice is that there's a big selection of items, often at better-than-grocery-store prices. For example, I love Seventh Generation products, and I get a better deal through Amazon than I would at Whole Foods.

I'm wondering though... how is the merchandise delivered? If my box of Clif bars shows up inside an additional Amazon shipping box, the extra packaging seems a little wasteful, doesn't it? At least I can recycle my grocery bags over and over at the store.

I Give Good Tech Support

Actual technical question received today from "Vishal":

i see various virus spider shaped/heart shaped viruses in which pow dvd,winapp ,and all installed programs changed in to heart or spider shaped .how can i remove it.

Hmmm. I don't like spiders, Vishal, but I do love hearts. Are you sure you don't want to just leave the heart-shaped viruses? They sound pretty. Think it over and get back to me.

Fondly,
Sarah

Seek and Destroy

What can I say - I was once a hardcore Metallica fan. In third grade. My song/blog title is kind of misleading, actually, but "seek" is the closest I could come to "search", and I'm going to talk about searching in this post. Whatevs. It's early and I need about 4 more quarts of caffeine before I achieve coherence. Yes, I realize that 11 a.m. is not really very early to the rest of the world. Thanks for pointing that out, Einstein, but you're way off-topic. Moving on...

I've gotten a handful of innocent emails recently from folks looking for old Windows tips or Downloads of the Day (articles I used to write in conjunction with TechTV segments), or just cool stuff I used to file away in the "Web/Tech" category of this site. They're all legitimate inquiries, since recently I removed category displays from my main page, effectively rendering all future searches through the archives as useless as a day spent finding a needle in a haystack. I didn't do it on purpose - I just really thought that nobody cared about learning how to add custom images to their Windows XP Start button anymore. Obviously, I was wrong. So I've added a new search function below my Archives list in the left-hand column on this page. It seems to work pretty well so far. You're welcome.

Redirecting Myself

At first I thought having a separate index page at "sarahlane.com" was a good idea... but then decided it was pointless. If you were looking for my blog, you were just going to have to immediately click the "blog"  link anyway. I don't want to complicate things unnecessarily, so now "sarahlane.com" just automatically points to this blog. If you weren't looking for this blog, well, it's not the end of the world that you ended up here. I'm a delight, really. And if you're looking for my other projects, you can find them in the "All About Me" links. In a nutshell, nothing has changed. I know that this is perhaps my most riveting post yet. You're welcome.

Guess Who's Back?

UPDATE 4/7: Theme switched! I like this look a lot more. Thanks to Mario Carboni for designing it.

------------------------------------

If you're reading this post, congratulations! You're extremely hip and up-to-date. I'm starting back up the old blog here at "sarah. word." Give me a few days to settle on a new theme and layout, and we'll be good to go. I thought I liked this one, but something about it bugs me. Maybe the text is too small?

As for "sarah. on the run.", it's not going anywhere, but activity will halt until the next time I travel.

iWeb is for Dummies.

And thank goodness for that, because I am really, really rusty.

Despite my HTML skills of swiss cheese, I still managed to turn a new homepage for sarahlane.com live today! It's not much more than a skeleton at this point, but you get the idea. I have quite a bit of fussing left to do. Which is great, because I love to fuss.

New domains that point to sarahlane.com:
brendanandsarah.com (the overall name for now)
brendanmoran.tv

My blog will remain on Typepad for the time being. I have no pressing reason to leave what I consider to be a reliable and intuitive blogging engine, though I wasn't kidding about giving it a new look. That's my next project.

Unemployment? Bah! I've never been so busy!

:)
s

Donning a New Skin

I've spent the better part of the last few days reading other folks' travel blogs, trying to get some inspiration for our own site redesign. sarah.word. has always been my personal outlet, but as it will soon serve as a base for the Amazing Adventures of the Traveling Morans, it deserves a facelift and restructure to reflect our new direction. Hardy har.

What's comforting is the number of really well-done travel blogs upon which I've already stumbled. I have little doubt we'll be able to update regularly, no matter where we are. What's daunting are the countless choices I have in regards to organizing our own journey. I'm leaning toward something like what Mark Yiin has done (his link was posted in my comments section, thanks!!). Not only is his blog easy to navigate, but he takes swell photos and tells good stories about his follies in a lot of the same places we'll be enjoying. Hey Mark, I want my Sunday back!

Anyway, I'm all ears if you have advice and suggestions for how this blog should look going forward. Be honest! Have your say! Brendan has already banished my present (and adorable) pink/gray/green color theme. I'm going to go ahead and blame it on his colorblindness. Besides, it's time for a change.

:)
s