It’s hard to believe, but five years ago today this site started out as an experiment to see what sort of things I could share with the world regarding life in Antalya. I feel like I’m still very much in the experimental phase, and maybe I always will be, but I love the people I’ve met along the way, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the next five years will bring.

My most sincere and heartfelt thanks to all of you.

Wow. Somehow in the year or so between each layout change I always forget what a complicated process it is to achieve cross-browser compatibility, and how processor-intensive it is on the brain.

After dealing with the first round of troubleshooting feedback (thanks, everyone) and getting to bed at 6:00 this morning, I sat bolt upright at about 9:30 and thought, hey, why isn’t that div floating left? This is, of course, a perfectly normal thing for a person to think upon waking. And naturally, upon digging around I discovered that my un-floating div was not due to a simple missing float tag that would have taken 30 seconds to add in, but rather a much bigger issue that required ten hours of my time to fix.

And it’s still not right. It’s a lot more right than it was, though, and I’m hoping that those who reported problems last night (especially Yvonne) are seeing things more as they should be today (i.e. three columns side-by-side). I say “especially Yvonne” because her problem is the most baffling— we use the same browser and OS, and yet it looks right in my Mac Firefox and wrong in hers.

Believe it or not, I love dealing with this stuff. I find great satisfaction in fixing annoying problems. However, I have been ignoring a few minor things over the past few days— you know, like sleeping, eating, exercising, and personal hygiene. Emirhan thinks he’s living with a very stinky zombie, so I’m going to take the rest of the night off from fixing markup and maybe do something radical like showering and having a meal.

Do keep reporting issues in the comments, though— your feedback is invaluable and really helps me narrow down what’s working and what isn’t working. You guys are awesome alpha testers; thank you for that.

You might notice there are a few tiny changes around here… you know, minor ones.

The fundamental problem with the old faucet layout was its inflexibility. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it, but as the site evolved, and as my purpose with the site evolved, the layout became increasingly inappropriate. As my photography started gaining momentum I wanted my photos to have a more prominent role in the site, and with the faucet layout there just wasn’t any place to do that. Also, I recently found out that the great majority of my readership has no idea that I am a musician first and foremost, and the reason they don’t know is because with the old layout, there was absolutely nothing to indicate anything musical about me, nor was there any room to add anything like that in. In fact, the layout was so restrictive, that even the blog content was pretty much strangled down to a single category, because nothing else really made sense in that visual context.

With that in mind, I started working on a new layout a few months ago, but… I don’t know, it just failed miserably. For all the hours and hours of work I put into it, in the end it was suspiciously like the faucet layout— not aesthetically, but in structure. Still no room to grow, still no way to give any hint about where I think this site is going.

So, with a heavy heart, I took that new layout and I trashed it. The whole thing, just dragged the folder over to the trash. And then I quickly emptied the trash so that I wouldn’t be tempted to change my mind.

It took a couple of months for me to get over that breakup. The thought of staring at an empty text file titled “index.php” and knowing that I had to write everything from scratch all over again was a bit much to handle at that point. Normally I look forward to a new project with excitement, but this wasn’t a new project— it was a redo of an old project.

After giving myself some time to regroup, I came back to the table with some truly fresh ideas, and even a plan or two. Instead of heading directly into writing code, which is what I usually do, I started out with what I wanted to have happen visually. I actually storyboarded the site before I ever got near the text editor, and I think that made all the difference.

Anyway, I hope you like the result.

Changes that have already happened:

• New look, in case you hadn’t noticed;
• Three columns – more room for stuff;
• Everything has its own place, and there’s potential to expand;
• Ads are gone – Google has failed miserably to provide my readers with advertising content that might be relevant to this site. The moderate amount of income I get from the ads is neither here nor there, and I’m happy to live without it if we never have to look at another crazy diet scam ad again. I will probably look for other ways to monetise, but if and when that happens, whatever I choose will make sense within the context of the site;
• Cleaned up my links – I had so many links on blogroll where I either had no idea what the linked site was about, or in some cases the sites were actually dead. I’ll be building this list back up with links to content that is relevant to what we do here;
• The “like” button – I’m a huge fan of Facebook’s “like” feature— it’s a much easier way to let an author know you like something without having to make a ridiculous “I like this” comment, which no one ever bothers with anyway. One click, and you’re done;
• Polls – wait, what? Yes, you heard right. Extremely fun and deliciously time-wasting polls.

Still-brewing features to be rolled out over the next couple of weeks:

• New posting categories – we’re going to start talking about stuff, lots of different stuff;
• Changes to subscriptions – Feedburner has taken a very unfortunate nosedive since the move to Google (again with the GoogleFail), and the whole thing has left a very bad taste in the mouths of a lot of feed owners like myself. I think the lesson here is that if you have the available bandwidth to handle distributing your own feeds (which I do), then trusting a third party to do it is probably not the smartest move. I just have to work out a few logistical things first, but then we’re going to start moving everyone back home to the native feeds;
• More options for people who prefer e-mail – e-mailed feeds, and options to have follow-up comments e-mailed to you in threads you’d like to follow;
• More stuff in the Features and Projects sections, and rotating content in both places;
• Major changes to the way comments are handled – I’ll be switching us to nested comments within the next day or so (finally, thank dog), and then we’ll have some teething to go through with that, no doubt;
• A few aesthetic tweaks – there are a few things I don’t completely like the look of, but I’ll fix them as I encounter them. No biggie.

I’m going to need your help with a lot of this stuff— giving feedback when you find things that are broken, and so forth. But just bear with me for the moment… I’m still working out the kinks, and I do know that a few things need fixing. The contact form is borked at the moment, for instance, and that’ll just have to stay down for a couple of days until I get around to unborking it. Do let me know if anything is seriously broken for you, though, like to the point where the site is completely unusable. Be sure to mention what browser and OS you’re using.

And that’s all I have to report at the moment. I had a lot of fun making this layout; I hope it increases your enjoyment of the site.

Oh, and if you don’t like the look of the header image up at the very top… don’t worry, you’ll get a new one next time you visit a page.

And still she manages to keep her styles from the ’50s, which means… which means she’s right on target, actually.

Hang tight, folks: I have to do a bit of housecleaning around here, and 1:00 in the morning on a Monday in June seemed the perfect time. I won’t bother taking the site offline, because I’m not going to do anything that will mess with the database, but anyone browsing the site from the web during the next few hours may experience intermittent or indeed constant spells of acute wonk.

You have been warned.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank Dean Lee, who instantly solved all my permalink restructuring issues by writing a WordPress plugin that automatically generates 301-redirects in order to preserve page ranking and prevent broken links.

What does this mean for you, the reader? Cleaner, easier-to-remember URLs, and no post-restructuring mess to deal with.

For me, it means a hell of a lot of work I no longer have to think about doing.

If you do happen to find any broken links, you can address your hate mail to Dean directly.

JOKE, joke. You won’t find any broken links. His plugin is good, I’ve tested it.

Who let March in? Was it you? Or you? I’m pretty sure I didn’t authorise that.

Just a quick state-of-the-union address:

• Last month I had a fantastic opportunity to photograph the fabulous Hillside Su hotel in Antalya. The place is beyond amazing, and I hope that comes across in the photos. Check out the set if you want to see how we roll with five stars round these parts.
• Site news: despite appearances, I am in fact working on the new site layout. Ironically, simplifying things has become a little more complicated than I expected, but I’m nearly done with the back-end mods, and soon I’ll be glossing up the front end. Expect major changes.
• The bazaar has been canceled the past two weeks due to being rained out. I think that’s the first time since I’ve lived here that we’ve lost two weeks in a row to weather. Obviously that’s not good for me, but the bigger issue is that it’s really not good for the vendors who depend on the bazaar for their livelihood. I really hope that people come out in droves today and make up for lost time. I certainly will— I’m almost out of photos, and completely out of vegetables.

Oh, and because I know you guys love social networks and fun timewasters, here are three things I’m into these days:

• Likaholix [check mine out and add me]
• Plinky [check mine out and add me]
• Physics Games [warning: you will waste hours playing these]

Time to head down to the bazaar and see what’s on offer.

And when I say “we,” I mean you, too— yesterday during Blogday 2008, fellow blogger Henry Michel (whom most of you know because he’s twitter-famous) chose melissamaples.com as his pick for “funniest blog.” Woo! Many thanks to him for that.

The article is in French, and I won’t bore you with a complete translation of how awesome I am, but the gist of the last paragraph is that half the awesomeness belongs to you guys— as Henry Michel rightly points out, most of the fun of the bazaar posts has to do with the banter we get going back and forth in the comments. Many times your captions are way funnier than mine, and I thank all of you for your contributions. The only correction I might make is that the article says I’m English (in reality my parents are German and I was born in the United States), but hey, I’ve lived so many places now (including the UK) that it’s all a blur anyway. Link

I make an effort to share my work as fairly as I can. Everything I create on this or any other site is licensed under Creative Commons in such a way that it allows anyone to download and use stuff however they want, providing they give me proper credit for the work I’ve done (i.e. a link back to my site if they use my work on their own site). I don’t mind people taking my images outright and putting them up on their own servers, as long as that credit link is there.

What I’m not prepared to do, however, is pay for the bandwidth to allow people to hotlink to my images. It’s not like I’m preventing anyone from copying the image and using their copy locally— just steal it properly and put it up on your own server, it’s not that hard! I’ve been lazy about letting hotlinkers get away with it, because I hate blocking my site’s content from people who want to see it. But the hotlinking from one particular site finally got to me this morning, because the guy is using my images to advertise his own stuff, and making it seem like he took the pictures himself. As far as I can tell there is no mention of my site or credit for the photos anywhere on his site. So I decided to do something about it.

I’m usually not a fan of htaccess rewrites, just because you always run the risk that your security measures will block things you don’t want to block (feedreaders, for example). So for the moment I’ve only blocked that one particular domain from accessing my images, and this morning he’s going to find that his hotlinked images are replaced with this:

I was really, really tempted to use the goatse picture instead, but in the end the self-promoter in me won over.

If the hotlinking becomes a more widespread problem and I’m manually having to block several domains per day, or I find that the majority of the hotlinkers have their hearts in the right place (i.e. they’re giving proper credit but still hotlinking my images because they just don’t know how to upload a local copy), I might change the htaccess to place a watermarked advertisement on the images rather than replacing them altogether.

Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning this here is because I’m paranoid that by messing around with the htaccess I may have broken my site for some innocent readers, and I’d appreciate a comment here if that’s the case. Obviously pictures are a big part of what makes this site work, so you should be able to see them if you want to. Sure, it’s fun to burn hotlinkers, but not at the expense of legitimate traffic. You guys are much more important to me than vengeance.

Also, if anyone has a more elegant solution that would work in the long term (I admit my quick fix this morning is short-sighted), please do suggest it. I’m open to anything.

You may have noticed the lack of non-bazaar photos over the past couple of months here. That’s because the day after I took the photos of our local rose garden back at the end of April, my little trusty point-n-shoot (which was a generous gift from one of this blog’s readers) gave up the ghost. This left me without a digital camera, aside from my phone, which does take good pictures for what it is, but is hardly what you’d call a real camera.

I guess I’ve been kind of jonesing for a while about the situation, wanting to do something photographic, and since film photography gets really expensive really fast (though I do love my film cameras), I decided instead to head down a different road and take the opportunity to get all my old photos organised. I’ve had a flickr account for a couple of years now, but it’s mostly been sitting there rotting because I host my blog photos locally on my own site, and anyone else who asked to see photos usually requested that I e-mail them. But now that I have a big photo archiving project in the works, it made sense to have a place to put my pictures where people could see them. After all, what is the point of getting everything organised if no one gets to benefit from it? So I upgraded to flickr pro, and that was one problem taken care of.

The other problem was significantly larger: 95% of my photo archive is non-digital. I have boxes and boxes of prints sitting in an attic. Thing is, that attic is not in this country. When I moved to Turkey, there was a weight limit to how much stuff I could bring, so photos were a pretty low priority when compared to essential items. That means my pictures are still in England (which is where I lived before here). Luckily, I managed to talk kind and wonderful Lily into going through those boxes, and scanning in the best shots. I’m starting to get those photos uploaded to flickr now, and hundreds more are on the way.

This project, however, has done little to distract me from the fact that I don’t have a camera. In fact, it has made the jonesing worse. So many people are doing fantastic work on flickr, and I was shocked to discover that a good portion of them don’t have expensive equipment. I was particularly impressed with the cheap-n-cheerful Nikon D40, which is just about the only DSLR camera remotely near my rock-bottom price range. For a pro photographer chances are it wouldn’t be acceptable, but for the likes of me it would probably be just fine. Certainly I like the photos I’ve seen that were taken with it. I think most of what I like about photography has to do with the eye of the photographer rather than the equipment.

So I started researching the D40. And that made me want it more. I talked to some D40 owners. All said the camera had performed way over their expectations, especially given that it’s the cheapest DSLR out there.

Nonetheless, even though it’s only a few hundred dollars, that’s still a lot of money for me, not something I can just slap down at the cash register without a thought. I agonised. I weighed the pros and cons of making a major purchase. By this afternoon, I’d found the online shop with the best price on the D40, and I was toying with that “buy it now” button. Do I click? Do I not click? I get myself in this panic every single time I buy anything at all.

Then a most unexpected sign came from the heavens… or at least, from twitter:

@melissamaples I love your photos and a dslr would be a great addition for you, hope you will be able to swing it.

Oh, how can I not respond to encouragement like that? Terry gave me the confidence to click that “buy it now” button, even though I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to work out all the financial stuff. Life is short, Antalya is changing everyday, and I want to record it with photos.

So it appears I bought a camera, and now I have to figure out how to replace the money I used. No sooner did I have that thought than I got a message from PayPal – Terry sent a generous donation, “to help with the cost of the camera.” I could hardly believe my eyes. Thank you, Terry. I hope the photos you start seeing here pretty soon make the donation worth it for you. I’ll do my very best to show all of you exactly how Antalya looks through my eyes. Really, sometimes I think it’s the most beautiful place in the world.

I own a grown-up camera! I’m pretty excited. Of course I’ve purchased it at that most awkward of times, Friday evening, so I don’t expect that the next-day free delivery thing applies to me. I’m guessing they’ll send it Monday, and I’ll have it Tuesday-ish. I hope I don’t have a what-have-I-done heart attack before then.

If anyone would like to be flickr friends, please do add me. I only have about a hundred photos there now, but Operation Scan-and-Upload is well under way, and my photostream is growing everyday. When I get the D40, watch out.

If anyone else would like to make a donation (however small, every bit helps) to the Pay For The Camera I Already Bought fund, you can use the gold donation button at the top of the sidebar on the left-hand side of this page. I will pay you back in the form of awesome This Is Antalya and Life of Melissa photo posts, you have my word.

Thanks again to Terry, and to all of you who have been such amazing supporters of this blog for nearly two years now. I appreciate the continual kindness you have shown me through RSS subscriptions, comments, e-mails, story and photo submissions, donations, and connecting with me on every social network out there.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.