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Hello!

Apologies for not posting an entry in so long but I was busy having kittens because of a mystery WordPress glitch that rendered my site unreachable and generally mucked things up. It is SO frustrating when you don’t have a clue what is happening with your site. It’s one thing to miss a week or so because you have lost your blogging mojo or you’re just plain tired - it’s another thing entirely when you have things to say and no way to say them!

Anyway it looks like I have cracked the mystery and sorted out the problem, so here I am. Now I’m cold and tired and it’s late so a proper post will have to wait.

I will share one piece of exciting news though - recently I added this little image to my sidebar as I like what this site is doing for crafty Aussies and… sure, they were running a competition too. All you had to do was register on their site and add their banner to your site - easy enough and I didn’t think any more about it.

And then I got an email that I had won one of six advertising packages on the site - valued at $5000! I nearly fell off my chair! They said that I generated the most links to their site during March which was also great to hear! It turns out that the $5000 package gets me a total of ONE ad on the site for a month. That’s one pricey advertisement so imagine the hits I could get from it. I will direct the ad towards my site at www.redinstead.com.au and see how that goes. Wow. Still can’t quite believe it.

I have been installing a few new WordPress plug-ins to my blog and doing a bit of behind the scenes fixing up around here:

I sorted through all the plug-ins on my blog and upgraded to newer versions and got rid of some useless ones. You can now see a listing of all the plugins I use on this site (in case you want to use any of them too) and you can use Viper’s Plugins Used plugin to make your own list.

I installed the very handy OneClick Installer plugin - this genious bit of code installs any plugin or theme without having to download, unzip then upload via FTP. Sometimes if the folder structure of the plugin is different to normal, this autoinstaller doesn’t do the job properly (in which case you just download, unzip, upload and install as before) but it works for the majority of plugins and is a real time and hassle saver.

I have done up a new people-friendly Site Map, that displays all the previous posts sorted into categories, using the Site Map Generator plugin.

I did a very quick upgrade of WordPress 2.3.2 to 2.3.3 just to be tidy. If you have multiple posters on your WordPress blog, you need this! Just for info, if you haven’t got yourself the Automatic Upgrade plugin then you are crazy. I used to dread upgrading my blog as I have customised it quite a lot but this tool takes care of everything for you, even ensuring you do all the necessary backups before you begin.

I improved my Contact Form. I used Contact Form with Spam Protection plugin so that it now blocks pesky robot spam.

I changed the Permalinks on my site so that for instance, www.jenleheny.com/archives/158 is now www.jenleheny.com/pillowcase-dress-instructions and I used a Permalink Migration plugin to ensure that no bookmarks or links from other sites were disrupted. This means that if you have a post of mine linked in the old format then you don’t need to update it - the magic of the plugin will still send people to the right place.

I added the fun CommentLuv plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenter’s blog just below their comment here on my blog.

I used the Dashboard Editor plugin to give myself a much more useful first page on the Admin side of things.

I set up a cool StumbleUpon-like random post link using the Random Redirect plugin - you can try it out here.

Can’t have a post without a picture!

Phew! I have been busy.

At last Tuesday’s Brindabella session, we had the opportunity to listen to a great talk on climate change given by someone from the Australian Conservation Foundation. It was really helpful to have someone to answer all our questions too! As you probably know, the Australian Federal Election is on November 24th so it’s time to make some noise, huh?

Here are a few links that you might find useful if you are interested in this kind of stuff, and you ought to be - we all have to live here:

Australian Conservation Foundation is committed to inspiring people to achieve a healthy environment for all Australians.

Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative which involves participants in a whole-of-school approach, to explore through real-life learning experiences, improvements in a school’s management of resources and facilities including energy, waste, water, biodiversity, landscape design, products and materials. It also addresses associated social and financial issues. The Initiative’s vision is for all Australian schools and their communities to be sustainable.

Climate Movement - Connecting Communities active on Climate Change

Walk against Warming (as in Global Warming) which takes place next Sunday 11th November

Who on Earth Cares - If you care about Climate Change, put yourself on the map. You can also optionally fill out some info and the site will generate a letter to your local politician for you. I sent mine to Annette Ellis last week!

Australian Election Scorecard on climate change and our future environment. The scores are based on an analysis of party policy commitments against ACF’s National Agenda for a Sustainable Australia. (more info on the site)

Here it is as it stands right now: