Melilyn.com

Like I mentioned before, I’m taking April 30 (tomorrow) off from blogging, as a way to honor the victims of Virginia Tech. I didn’t come up with this idea… there’s a website dedicated to it. One Day Blog Silence.

I’m joining many others across the blogosphere… so things may be quiet on the blog front tomorrow.

Tonight I’ve been working on the new layout. I’ve got a rough layout sketch, a good idea of where I want to go with the site features, and a good color scheme.

I like it, and I like how professional it appears in my head. Well, you know me… I’ve always got to change things up, and I think this is going to be the most effort I’ve put into this site in a long while. I’m not a good blogger, or an avid one, but I don’t know what I’d do without my little site here.

This blog is a mess. No, it really is! I put so much time into my other web endeavors, that a lot of time my original domain suffers. Disclaimer: This is another one of those “boring” webbery posts.

My archives take me back to 2005, and most of the posts that far aren’t even categorized nicely. Heck, most of them aren’t categorized at all. The site design is never mine (even though this Mac theme is HOT). The sidebar is always generic, and there’s no identity to this site. I mean… it’s not like you come to this site and think “hey, that’s Meli’s site.”

I think I’ve been treating it like my old xanga, still. Blog every so often about what’s been happening, change the layout and colors when I get bored, and move on with life.

Seriously, you should see the backend of this place. My stats panel tells me that I’ve got “188 posts and 381 comments, contained within 16 categories.” Sounds nice, but in some of those categories there’s, like, hardly anything.

I’ve been reading a lot on how you can really improve your blog to reflect who you really are, and I think I’m going to put a lot of that into practice. So… keep an eye out for some changes and most likely a new layout. I’m going to be recategorizing a lot of posts, so any of you who are subscribed to my feed, I apologize if a lot of old posts come up.

I’m having a bit of a dillema on another site… I won’t go into specifics, because most of you don’t even have an interest in this kind of thing, but recently I created this great layout. I had an idea in my head, and I was looking around at other sites for ways I could possibly jazz it up.

Now, when you’re decorating a house, and you’re looking for ideas, you tend to look at those interior design magazines, or through wallpaper samples at the local paint store, or watch those “fixer-upper” shows on the home and garden channel for inspiration. Later, when you’re in your own house, planning exactly what color scheme you’re going to use in a certain room, and what couch you’re going to put against the back wall, and what style curtains will look the best on the window over the kitchen sink… inadvertantly, you will use ideas you found in your search for inspiration.

Sometimes, inadvertantly, you buy three pieces of furtiture you’ve been looking at separately, without realizing that you had already seen them in the same living room. I mean, that just happens. The human mind retains this kind of stuff without really thinking about it consciously.

Anyhow, all of this to say that I may be having copyright issues on this layout. Going around different websites, I made a list of things that I liked… a link hover effect here, a color scheme there, a page idea over yonder. Well, when three or four of those ideas were put onto my site, somebody stumbled across it and realized that they had, inadvertantly, all come from the same site. They’re commenting on it, saying that I’ve copied it from him and that they’re going to contact him to “see what he thinks.”

I’ll probably have to change the layout (which took me a month of tears, sweat, and PHP error messages) to appease them all, because his site is WAY more professional and well-read than mine… and in the Internet world, that means EVERYTHING.

Anyhow, I started this post to ask a question… seriously, what is Internet copyright? I mean, how can you prove without a doubt that you’re the one that came up with something in the first place? I mean, the guy who came up with, for example, having recent posts in the footer… does he have a document saying he did it first? And if he can’t prove it, why should I have to?

So I guess I’ll start working on another new layout before this gets out of hand. I hate hazy Internet rules… I really do. And I apologize to anyone I just bored to death. Sorry.