The LJ portion of this journal is FRIENDS ONLY.  Comment if you wish to let me know you added me as a friend as I'm hopeless with LJ notifications. Feel free to friend this journal; I don't bite! ;)

If you found this journal through icontests, icon posts, or other similar means, please friend my icon journal staticlost. This journal is my personal journal where all of my entries are locked and I do not post any icons or other graphics here - they are all posted at my community staticlost. Those who are interested in my graphics, I would more than love for you to watch that community for you to be able to keep up with my updates.

I cross-post all entries from my blog to this journal as well.  Feel free to friend this journal if you are interested in reading my blog updates!

I use a handful of plugins for this blog, and as I’m always on the lookout for more useful plugins to add/activate, I thought it’d be useful to come up with my own list of favorite WordPress plugins.

• Bird Feeder
  Like many bloggers, I have a Twitter account. Bird Feeder publishes a tweet to my blog every time I publish a blog entry, which is a lot easier than doing it manually as I’d forget!
• JournalPress
  There are quite a few crossposting plugins out there, but JournalPress is my favorite. It handles drafts and scheduled posts, and it can also crosspost simultaneously to more than one external journal site. I have mine set to crosspost to both my LiveJournal and Dreamwidth accounts.
• Random Redirect
  This plugin is a “randomizer” of sorts for your blog entries. It’s very similar to StumbleUpon, for it allows visitors to “stumble” across random entries within your blog. After you activate the plugin, you simply need to add /?random at the end of your blog URL to view a random blog entry! To see it in action on my own blog, click here.
• Secure WordPress
  No script is 100% secure, and WordPress is no exception to that. Secure WordPress makes a few small/minor changes to your WordPress installation to make it a little more secure against hackers.
• WP Super Cache
  WP Super Cache quickens the speed of a WordPress installation. I’m not entirely sure how it works (something to do with generatic static HTML files, Apache, and easing database processing load), but it’s all explained on the plugin page. Recently, my host’s support team suggested for me to use WP Super Cache, and it’s worked wonderfully since I started using it.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I have never had paella before, but one of the episodes of Throwdown! with Bobby Flay featured a shellfish and chicken paella recipe. It looked delicious, and as the recipe was available online, my mom and I decided to try it out. Shellfish, chicken, chorizo, rice, saffron, peas… the ingredients in this dish were endless, but that’s what made it look so tasty!

Here is the recipe, courtesy of the Food Network’s website. My mom and I made some changes to the dish: we eliminated the peas, used only chicken wings instead of a whole chicken, doubled the amount of squid and clams, eliminated octopus altogether, and halved the amount of mussels. And while the dish pictured above might not have the best presentation (it’s hard to work out a good presentation for paella when the shellfish and chicken are cooked in a pot with the Arborio rice, tomatoes, chorizo, chicken stock, and lemon aioli mixture!) it was absolutely heavenly. This shellfish and chicken paella was a seafood aficionado’s dream for sure!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

While browsing Craft, Crafty, Craftier, a fantastic craft resource site, I found a pattern for a six-pocket bag. I like sewing, I like bags, and I like pockets, so I set about making a six-pocket bag of my own.

It turned out very well, especially since I haven’t sewed anything from a pattern in a long, long time. I love the three fabrics I picked out and how they all match together, as well as the six pockets on the outside, three on each side. I even added a little pocket on the inside of the bag (I told you I liked pockets). The batting I used to reinforce the sturdiness of the bag works very nicely, and it’s plenty roomy inside to stash my keys, phone, wallet, and all the other stuff I need to cart around from day to day.

I already have my next six-pocket bag in the works. I have my fabrics picked out (even if it did nearly kill me in the process to come up with three compatible fabrics that I liked), all I need is to sit down and start making it. I’m going to make my next one a little bigger than this ladybug one though, so I can use it during the school year to carry around my laptop, textbook, and notebooks!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

When I returned to the blogging scene at the beginning of this year¹, I wanted to reconnect with my old blogging friends from two years ago. However, my search for old “affiliates”² proved to be futile. Many of them had quit the blogging scene, but even more had changed their URLs so that I didn’t/couldn’t know where to find them at their new location.

I’ve never really understood the compulsion to change one’s blog URL repeatedly every several months. I’ve only had three URLs for my blog: the first one expired when I stopped blogging, the second one was a subdomain on another domain I own, and the third one is my current URL, breakthesky.net. I do not plan on changing my blog URL anytime soon, if at all. Not only is it a hassle to move databases and files around whenever there is a domain change, but I think that a URL is part of every blogger’s online identity. I associate URLs with individual bloggers more than I do with a blogger’s name, mainly because the URL is the “face” of the blogger. While there are multiple names like Amanda or Sarah or Ben online, there is only ever one URL like breakthesky.net!

I can’t keep up with bloggers that change their domain names repeatedly. I understand a change once in a while may be necessary, whether it be for personal or monetary reasons, but moving a blog around just because one got tired of a domain name that has only been used for a month makes no sense to me. It’s hassle for the blogger to move things around, and an even bigger hassle for visitors who need to update URLs, bookmarks, and RSS feed subscriptions. Sooner or later, after repeated moves in a short amount of time, visitors aren’t going to continue keeping track of a blogger’s digital trail in the blogosphere. This is why constantly changing one’s blog URL makes no sense to me: doesn’t every blogger want readers? And if so, then why do so many insist on changing their URLs willy-nilly just for the sake of doing so and without any particular reason?

1. I first entered the blogging scene in late 2005/early 2006. I ended up closing that blog in early 2007 when the domain expired as I had registered the domain with a previous host (if only I had known better than to do that!) and didn’t return to blogging until early 2009. [↩]
2. I use the quotation marks when talking about affiliates because blogs don’t have them, at least not in the way affiliation is supposed to work. To quote Jem, who explained it best in one of her unrequested reviews: “…affiliating websites pre-dates personal sites and the need to pat one another on the back for a job well done each time a person blogs. Affiliation is for driving relevant traffic and backlinks, plain and simple.” [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.