Monkey House

As you can see, the site is undergoing a redesign.

I think I’ve learned enough about web development and WordPress to design one from scratch, but I know myself, and I know the path to ruination that would bring. So, I’m taking a theme that’s slightly less than perfect for my needs and making gradual changes. The assumption is that the things I would like to change are at least “tolerable” for now, and that I can therefore take my sweet time changing them.

Excruciatingly boring to most readers, but here’s what the strategy is:

1. Start with Web2Feel’s spiffy Androida Theme
2. Change the core look and feel and redesign a custom header using our Monkey House branding
3. Make sure the most absolutely important base functionality is restored and/or created:
   1. Make a link to a “Blog” page that lists the whole sequential blog for people who like that kind of thing
   2. Get rid of the banner spaces… I don’t need no stinkin’ banners… nobody pays me for advertising space! Maybe a Flickr widget would be cool…
4. Fix a visual artefact in the slider
5. Write some PHP to complement the slider… when a gallery image isn’t specified, some sort of default placeholder image is put there
6. Fully Widgetize any area that can sensibly be widgetized
7. Modularize the whole thing so that child themes can be made with simpler CSS and fewer image changes

Not to criticize the folks at Web2Feel. This is one of the best FREE themes you can get. But it has some flaws, and I think it will be fun learning how to fix them.

So far, I’ve obviously done the first few steps. It was a lot of fun taking the basic monkey and logo created by Jan at Dawghouse and creating new Alex and Cole monkeys from it.

Next step… get a “Blog” page ready.

A bit of a delayed post… pretty rude to post something when it’s your anniversary, I would imagine!

So, we recently celebrated our first wedding anniversary. Leading up to it, we had discussed whether to go with the traditional anniversary gifts (paper, then… er… well, I didn’t research what year 2 is supposed to be, if anything…) and opted to go for it. But then life happened, and we didn’t get around to the whole gift-buying thing. It’s not “too late” in our world. At least one half of our clan is notorious for buying delayed gifts, and since it’s Mama Monkey’s half of the clan, I’m not in the doghouse.

As it turns out, trying to celebrate an anniversary when you have a 7 wk old baby is a bit of a challenge! Here’s what the plan was:

1. Afternoon on the market; baby in a sling or wrap, us buying nice fruit, cheeses, and generally enjoying a stroll.
2. Dinner at home, provided by my wonderful parents… they knew we’d eat at home (obviously) and had brought us some yummy treats from M&M.
3. Drive-in movies (this time armed with ways to combat mosquitoes!). Harry Potter is playing.

Here’s the reality:

RAIN.

So, we opted for a nice quiet day at home. To spice it up a bit, and because I did not feel like BBQ’ing in the rain, we got some take-out from our favourite Sushi restaurant, Sushi 88. I’m usually a pure sashimi guy, but I had a hunger on, so we also got some yummy specialty rolls. That’s a tradition I can get into… a good roll is teh yummay! Once the sushi settled down, we topped it off with a wicked-good bumbleberry pie that was part of the M&M treats.

Well, the intention of this post isn’t to bore you with the minutia of our lives, but rather, as an excuse to say the following:

Alie, I love you so much. I can’t imagine a life without you, and I’m so glad that this was only the first year out of many to come. You are my soul. Happy Anniversary, baby!

We’ve decided to make parts of this blog private. Excerpts will have a message saying that you need to register in order to read the content. Friends and family should register… that’s who it’s really for, as any “private” content will just be pictures or details that we don’t really feel comfortable putting in the general public. If you’re a casual reader of the blog, you’re not going to be missing much by not registering.

As a side punishment to myself for implementing the plug-ins, I get to have a tremendous blow to my ego when I realize that not even my parents are reading the blog.

As incentive for friends and family signing up, here’s a link to a medium-resolution photo of the little guy (suitable resolution for printing if you’re so inclined):

If you decide to register, please do so with a name or nickname we’ll recognize. I would know who “G-Dog”, “Reggae”, or “Greg” are, but I wouldn’t necessarily know who “hptwentysandals” with the email address “random1234@ilikesandals.com” is… I would assume it’s a spammer who’s trying to spam our blog with links to “hot sales on sandals”. If you’re not sure I’d recognize the name or email you’ve picked, write us ( info at monkey-house.ca ) and say, “Hey guys, just signed up with the username ‘youllneverguesswhothisis’”.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this easy-to-avoid grammatical error. Almost once daily at least, someone writes something that uses one of the following incorrectly-spelled words:

infinate, definate, infinately, definately

I sort of “get it.” But there are two things that should make it obvious quickly that those are the incorrect spellings:

1. When there is a vowel, followed by a single consonant, followed by a vowel, that first vowel takes the long form. The above incorrect words, the “ate” part would be pronounced like the past-tense of “eat”… (as in, “I ate a burrito for lunch”), or like the number eight.

Which is obviously incorrect… you would never say, “in – fin – eight”.

2. To me, this is the more important one. The base word for those misspelled words is “finite”, which is something having a limit. Even though a lot of people have heard this word, they don’t make the connection. Part of this is because of the difference in pronunciation. “Finite” is pronounced “fie – night”, whereas “Infinite” is pronounced “In – fin – it”. Long “i” for both in the former, and short “i” for both in the latter.

But if you remember that things can be “finite”, you should be able to remember that by contrast, other things can be “infinite”. You don’t change the spelling of the base word just because you add a prefix to it. It still contains the word “finite”, as does “definite.”

Image credit: DMTek Group, digital art by Ariel Duren