After I hadn't posted on here for several days, I was logged out for some reason, and unable to get back into the forum. Each time I clicked on the 'I forgot my password' link, I got a notification saying that a new password had been sent to my email address, but somehow I never got those emails. Luckily the support team on here are very friendly and helpful (thanks, Olga and Rebekah!), and I've been able to log into the forum again since this morning. 
The past week has been extremely busy for me. A friend asked me to set up some websites for him, and I transferred 22 of his domains to a new web host. I am hoping that most of those are going to be mirrors or redirects, and that he doesn't want me to set up 22 different sites for him! 
When I saw my parents a couple of weeks ago, they didn't only bring me tons of books, but also my father's old computer that he used to set up the family website. While 'family website' probably sounds like something simple and amateurish, it is actually a project that he spent the past ten years or so programming. All pages are created dynamically, there are user accounts for different family members and friends, image uploaders, multi-language support, and all together everything consists of around 10,000 files! Because of dementia, my father has forgotten almost all his programming skills, and he asked me to sort out the site for him, after it stopped working properly some time ago. But it is all way beyond me - my knowledge of PHP and MySQL is rather limited, and I know nothing at all about JavaScript and Perl.
At first, I was trying to get help on a web developers forum. But there is so much that seems to have gone wrong, that it seems to me that it would be faster and easier to set up everything afresh in WordPress, than to try and fix the existing site. Also, while my father might have been an expert at scripting, he doesn't really know anything about aesthetics and intuitive interface design. So I got myself a hosting contract yesterday, and I've started to set up the basic structure. In the past, I set up a number of static sites, and with WordPress as a framework, it is going a lot faster and easier than I expected, and I am finding myself enjoying the task, even though it seemed rather daunting at first. Nowadays there are free plug-ins for almost everything, which gives me time to work on the actual design, rather than having to fumble around with complicated code.
Although setting up websites isn't something that I want to do professionally, it is something that is keeping me busy (which is handy, as I never have to think about what to do), and it is going to earn me some money as well, which I will be able to further invest in more art materials and tools that I need. I've also got a working Windows computer for the first time since mine started playing up several years ago (so that I've only used it since then whenever I absolutely had to, and apart from that I've only been using my netboook), and my parents paid for a hosting contract that I can use for my own website, as well as for a number of add-on sites such as my parents' one (their web host is rather crap, and I wasn't even able to install WordPress on the server without getting error messages each time). Ten years ago, at the age of 62, my mother got her PhD in history (a few years after passing her Masters degree), and she needs the family website for her work, so I am trying to get that section to work first - and the historical society in the place where she lives need a new website too, so that might be another opportunity for me to keep myself busy and make a bit of money.
I know that probably all sounds rather technical and boring to most people. But I've also been making new friends, such as two days ago when I met some people whom I had only known online before. We met in a pub on the other side of town, which has a large terrace overlooking the park there. We had a great time while I was sipping my tea, and it feels good to have made a few friends. However, I did notice another effect of having stopped smoking - when I was a teenager, I'd regularly come home after a weekend out in nature with my body covered in insect bites, although by the time I was about 20, my blood seemed to have become so toxic that they always left me alone after that. But when I went to meet my friends, it was the second time in a week that my legs were completely stung to bits by some pesky mosquito(es)! I must say, if I manage to find a partner who finds me as sweet as those annoying blood suckers do, I'll be a very happy girl indeed! 
Statistics: Posted by Julia Stretton — Thu Sep 01, 2016 11:19 am