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.

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

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.

Edit: That all seems to have gone entirely too smoothly. So I guess we’re back up again.

…and in with the new:

I promised you guys a new layout this year, and here it is. I hope you like it, but to be honest I’m so in love with it right now that I probably wouldn’t care if you absolutely despised it. I’m a romantic that way.

The idea for the layout came from the fact that in ten years of site design and web authoring, I don’t think I’ve ever, ever made a site with a white background, though I’ve often wanted to. So this time I decided I was going to do it. And I like the result. It feels clean somehow.

And of course, once again we have Rachel Kelso to thank for her amazing skills with a camera. She’s responsible for about 90% of the coolness on this site.

Anyway, I’ve been php-ing for about twelve hours, so if you’ll excuse me I’m going to lie down and relax for a while.

See you guys tomorrow.

So, I’m sorry if you thought I was being lazy or ignoring you— neither is the case. I’m just not very observant.

The first thing on the agenda is a little experiment— the weekly bazaar is one of the more popular features with our ever-growing readership, and in recent months people have started commenting more and more frequently that they wished we could have a bazaar giggle every day of the week instead of just on Thursdays. So, in light of those suggestions (and because change is a good thing), effective immediately the weekly Thursday Is Bazaar Day feature will be slimmed down into daily doses for your Turklish reading pleasure. There will be at least one new photo everyday, and they’ll be ones you haven’t seen before, fresh and chuckle-worthy to get your day started off the right way, seven days a week. I do take your feedback seriously, so hopefully this is a move in a direction that reflects what you’ve been asking for.

There will be a few more changes around here, most of which will be cosmetic. The site is pretty as it is, but I think we’re all ready for a new layout, yes? There will probably be some shuffling of content as I start to incorporate more useful information into the site, but I’ll try to keep the confusion to a minimum, and as always the blog will remain on the front page, so those of you who come here looking for light-hearted fun won’t have to change a thing about the way you view the site.

Lastly, I want to thank each and every one of my readers for making the first year of melissamaples.com a wildly successful one— it’s gone better than I ever could have imagined, thanks to your loyalty and patience with me. As I ramp up the changes here, please do keep those comments coming and let me know what you think. Your opinion is important to me, and what you guys want directly affects the content you see here.

So, let’s get our bags packed and head swiftly into our second year together, shall we?

Here’s to a new year full of the mysteries and delights of the language we like to call Turklish.

I’ll cut to the chase: I’m going away for a couple of weeks. It’s not a holiday, as such— it’s a Vipassana retreat up near Istanbul. I’m leaving tonight, (i.e. Wednesday night, the 10th), and I’ll be back on the 24th.

Those of you who are familiar with Vipassana retreats don’t need to read any further… if you’re not familiar with Vipassana but don’t care all that much, suffice it to say I’ll be engaging in some hardcore silent insight meditation for ten days, with some travel time on either side. That’s about it.

The semi-long version of the story is that about a year ago I started dabbling in Vipassana via the online teachings of Gil Fronsdal [wiki]. I had wanted to try meditation for a long time but didn’t really know where to start, so like most of my peer group I turned to the internet for help. I stumbled upon Zencast, and it pretty much snowballed from there. I’ve never had any formal training, just my little bits of practicing at home and whatever I’ve read online.

Vipassana is an ancient form of meditation that focuses on insight and seeing things how they really are, without changing or judging them. It’s a practice that dates more than two millennia back to the Buddha himself, whose teachings have been passed down through generations all the way to a handful of Vipassana masters who still teach today. I like the idea of being an objective observer of things I should normally feel very subjective about (for example my breath and the state of my body), so I found the concepts of Vipassana very attractive. It has to be said, though, I’m not the most diligent meditator— consistency is key with these things, and I’ve hardly been sitting every day. I started to think maybe a meditation group or a teacher might be the next step.

Then a month or so ago I made the observation that not only had I never seen a Turkish Buddhist, I’d never even met any Turkish people who meditated (meditation being a secular practice in itself open to those of any religion or no religion). I started looking online for Turkish meditation groups, and since Vipassana is a particular interest of mine, I narrowed my search to see where in the world Vipassana retreats or sittings are held. At first it didn’t look like there was much going on in this part of the world, but then I found the web site of S.N. Goenka, a Vipassana master whose ten-day intensive retreat courses are held, quote, “all over the world.” Yeah, sure. All over the world except for Turkey, I thought. But lo and behold, when I looked at the list of course locations, there was a name and a contact address for Turkey along with a note stating that the next retreat would be held in October 2007. I fired off an e-mail asking for more information and waited a couple of days for a response.

Meanwhile, diligent researcher that I am, I started digging around for blogs and forums where I could read the opinions of those who had already taken a ten-day Goenka Vipassana course. I soon discovered that there is a huge amount of controversy surrounding this method of Vipassana and indeed Vipassana in general— I won’t bore you with the details, because you know how to Google stuff if you’re curious, but in a nutshell there appear to be a lot of people who fiercely defend this method as a tool for exorcising one’s personal demons, and a lot of other people who say it ruined their lives. One thing all seem to agree on, however, is that the retreat changed them forever.

So of course then I was even more curious, and by the time the organisers of the retreat wrote me back I’d pretty much already decided I wanted to go. I filled out my application and it was accepted the same day. I leave on a bus tonight to travel across the country (which reminds me, Turkish bus travel is something else I wanted to talk about— perhaps when I return from this trip, yeah?), arrive at the site tomorrow afternoon, and then I’ll be locked up with my fellow students for ten days, waking before dawn and meditating for ten hours everyday, eating only before noon and not communicating with anyone in any form (not even eye contact or hand gestures). It’s bound to be quite an experience.

Part of the strict code of conduct for the retreat states that we’re not allowed to have journals or writing materials, which means I’m just going to have to remember everything and write it down later. Since I’ve once again signed up for NaNoWriMo this year (what is it with me and controversial methods?), I figure that at the very least this retreat will be a good opportunity to dig up some internal conflict, create an empty female protagonist, and on the first of November I can just shove all the demons into her and turn her loose in novelworld.

In any case, I’ll be back here two weeks from today— I’ve not got any guest writers or anything lined up, so the blog is going on retreat, also. You’ll have to live without the bazaar for a couple of weeks, but when I come back I’ll have lots of stories and photos, and after that I’ve got lots of changes planned. We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of melissamaples.com, and I want to take it into the second year revitalised and fresh. I hope you’ll join me.

I wish you all a great couple of weeks, and I’ll see you when I get back.

It’s possible this can have one semi-negative side effect— some RSS subscribers may receive apparent reposting of older items. I apologise in advance if this becomes annoying… on the other hand, I hope you discover something interesting that you missed the first time around. Thanks for bearing with me while I try to make the site easier to navigate in preparation for some even bigger changes yet to come.

I know, I know, I went AWOL for a couple of days, but I swear, I have a genuine forged note from my parents explaining my absence. No, seriously, one look at this photo of me and you can probably tell what a rough couple of days it’s been. Friday the internet was broken in the hotel, and then once we got out and about we never stopped until we were on the bus back to Antalya (stories and photos of all this later, I promise). Then we got home later than expected yesterday and the day turned into a write-off, basically [insert stress and emotional drama and attempts at getting back to normal here]. Anyway, today’s a new day, another chance to turn it all around. I’ve just had a brief glance through the SD card at all the photos from the past two days, and I’m pretty excited about the things I have to show you. Unfortunately I have quite a busy day ahead (practical catch-up from being gone half the week), but I vow to find some time this evening to do some virtual catch-up as well and get some photo posts up. So until this evening, y’all have a great Sunday.

Okay folks, Emirhan and I are off to Istanbul tonight (or rather the wee hours of tomorrow morning). We’ll be back maybe Friday or Saturday. I’m not sure exactly how this will affect my blogging over the next few days (a lot depends on whether I can snag a free WiFi connection somewhere), but what I do know for sure is that there will be no bazaar post tomorrow (sorry, but I can’t go to the bazaar if I’m not here!), and that I’m going to take a truckload of photos in Istanbul to make up for whatever blogging I can’t do while I’m there. So either way, you guys will get to see some cool new stuff, but it might have to wait until Saturday. We’ll see. Anyway, have a great rest of the week, and hopefully I’ll be back in a few hours with reports of amazing free WiFi. Wish me luck.

Okay people, listen up! It’s time to talk meta.

Yesterday I received this comment:

You’re lucky to have visited such wonderful places. I just wish you can share more photos to us— people who are stuck in our office chair and couldn’t get more than the four corners of our computer monitor.

Well, funny you should mention… in fact I have been thinking the same thing for a long time, that blogging is great but a lot of the fun of blogging from various parts of the world is being able to share images with people halfway across the planet, to convey the beauty and personality of a place in a way that words just can’t do. But unfortunately, with finances being what they are, all I ever had to take photos with was my less-than-adequate cameraphone.

Until today, that is.

Generous reader and friend Martin Murray heard about my dilemma a few weeks ago, and kindly offered to send me a digital camera, along with all the goodies I need to get me photoblogging (SD cards and card readers and whatnot). I was taken aback by the offer, and I gladly accepted it. The camera arrived this morning, and let me tell you, it’s fantastic. It’s certainly a lot better than anything I could have gotten on my own. So Martin, thank you. I owe you big time.

This means that now’s a good time to announce some changes and improvements around here that I’ve been planning for a while. This week marks six months of melissamaples.com, and it’s time to review what’s behind us and look forward to the future:

• You’ve probably already noticed that recently I’ve been posting a lot more frequently. That’s going to continue and increase over the next few weeks as I get in the stride of true full-time blogging.
• Now that I’m equipped to go out on all those expeditions I’d been postponing due to the fact that I had no decent way to take pictures, you can expect to see a lot more photo-essay type things like yesterday’s story on Meis (for which I was lucky enough to have a guest photographer). The Turkish riviera is an amazing place, and I plan to show you and tell you all about it.
• There’s going to be a reorganisation of categories in the sidebar, to reflect the direction things have actually gone (as opposed to the way I predicted they would go six months ago). This means the categories will actually mean something and be useful.
• I’m also considering sprucing up the look of the site… nothing major, just a bit of freshening up for the summer.
• So many of you have said that you’d like this site to reflect more of my personal experience. The camera will help tremendously with that, as I can start documenting my adventures with photos, but also I’ve got a few ideas for themed projects that hopefully you will find entertaining and that will also give all of us a way to interact more directly. First up will be a series of posts following my ridiculous struggle to speak Turkish, and I’m also talking with some people about bringing in some guest bloggers and maybe even starting up a podcast. We’ll see what you guys respond to best and take it from there. My main goal is to have fun and make sure everyone who visits here has a fun time.
• And finally, don’t forget, the online bazaar shop will be opening very soon— several of you have mentioned specific t-shirts and other items you’d be interested in having, and those designs are nearly ready to go, but I’m still taking suggestions for other designs as well. So if you ever thought you’d like to own a particular shirt or bag or anything else from the bazaar, now’s your chance to speak up.

Thanks for making these past six months amazing for me; I’m looking forward to the next six more than you can know.

In the past, I have offered (albeit in a very casual way) to go down to the bazaar and purchase items on behalf of those of you who have expressed interest in owning some of the ridiculously delightful Turkish shirts, bags, and other items we get delivered to our neighbourhood every week. Problem is, since this is hardly an official arrangement, it’s quite complicated to try to get what people want, guess what the right Turkish size would be based on the size they gave me, hope I remember which vendor has which shirts, hope the vendor hasn’t run out, and then if I do manage to get the correct item there’s still shipping and money transfers and the hardly-reliable Turkish postal service to deal with. In short, there has to be a better way.

Then a friend of mine suggested, why not just put the shirts online and let people choose the ones they want and purchase them that way?

So that’s exactly what I’m doing. Within the next couple of weeks, you’ll be able to purchase a dozen or so different bazaar designs at the brand new melissamaples.com online bazaar shop! To start with I’ll be offering just the most popular designs on shirts and bags, but there’s no limit to how many or which designs I can do, so if there’s a particular shirt you had your eye on, please be sure to let me know. I’m planning on starting small and building an inventory based on your suggestions.

I’m very excited about the online bazaar, as it will take a lot of the stress off me for making sure you guys get exactly the shirts you want and that what you order gets to you safely and in a timely fashion. No more third-worlding it around here; welcome to the 21st century.

I have a little bit of catching up to do, and I know a lot of you have sent me e-mails and comments, but I assure you I’ll be sifting through the backlog over the next couple of days and getting everything here back on track. Hope everyone’s had a great weekend.

Hi guys, sorry I’ve been absent the past few days. Don’t worry, I’m not blogfading— we went to Ankara, and then things got a bit hectic around here on a personal front. I’m sure you know how it is. In any case, I’m back now, and it’s time to get caught up on stuff.

First off, there’s a small addition to the site. If you look at the social bookmarking links at the bottom of each post, you’ll notice there’s a new button there on the far left side that says “TwitThis.” I know some of you are savvy and are already thinking about the possibilities and don’t need any further explanation. But for those of you who either don’t twit yet, or have a twitter account but haven’t really explored its potential, here’s the Reader’s Digest version:

Twitter is a combination web site/public instant messaging forum whereby users (who register for free) answer the simple question, “what are you doing right now?” I joined back in January when twitter was still in the nest, but ever since SXSW, twitter seems to have taken full flight, and I for one am excited about what that means for bloggers like me and for cool people who want to get connected with other cool people in a simple way. If you don’t have a twitter account yet, you can get one here, and if you already have an account you can add me as a twitter friend (just click on the “add” link on the right sidebar).

TwitThis is a service whereby twitter users can take blog posts they find interesting and share them with the twittersphere. If you read something on this blog (or any other TwitThis-enabled blog) that you think needs to be shared with the world, just click on the “TwitThis” button at the bottom of the relevant post, and follow the pop-up instructions. It’s as simple as that. You can try it out on this post if you want to see how it works.

Twitter is not for everyone, and for those of you dead set against it, no worries— the TwitThis button is only there if you want it, and if you choose to ignore it, that’s cool too. But if you want in on the action, here are a few links to get you started:

Learn more or get a twitter account
Follow my twitter
Twitterrific (awesome Mac twitter client)
Twitteroo (client for the Windows people)
TwitThis (for the bloggers who want to plug in)

Twitter is specifically designed to be friendly to third-party applications and scripts, so if you’re the curious type, I’m sure you’ll quickly find hundreds of other twitter goodies on Google (my current favourite is twittervision).

As for this blog, I’ll get some new content up later today, I promise. In the mean time, I’ll see you on twitter, or if you’d rather start your day with a laugh, check out the bazaar library (new episode tomorrow!).

Update: I’ve noticed that if you want to twit a specific post, the TwitThis button only works correctly if you’re on the post’s permalink page; otherwise it just twits the main site url (which isn’t the end of the world, but still should be able to work either way). I’ve e-mailed the developer and hopefully things will be fixed soon. I love beta testing. Meanwhile sit tight and use permalinks if you want to twit a specific post.

Well, I was hoping to find something light and fluffy to talk about today, but then I came across this article at Boing Boing, telling me that I no longer had access to one of my favourite sites, YouTube (even now it feels weird to think that you can click on that link and get to the site, but I can’t). Unlike many places in the world, Turkey is a nation whose inhabitants have tremendous personal freedom, and until today we had the luxury of looking at internet censorship in places like China as something that happens “over there.” So not being able to access YouTube today is a big wake-up call for me, especially since there was no announcement from my ISP and I had to learn about the block from an unrelated web site in the United States. It makes me wonder what might be next under the guillotine, though it does seem that the particular law that was allegedly broken is very specific in that it only sets parameters governing the public portrayal of Atatürk, and can’t be used as a blanket to censor other speech.

I’ve been told by a couple of intelligent Turkish sources that court decisions like these can be mostly for show and often get reversed quite quickly, but of course everything about this situation is still unfolding around the word “allegedly,” so I think we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. I’m not particularly interested in starting a political argument in this forum, but I will say that I am an active YouTube account holder, as are many of my friends and associates, and so of course this decision affects all of us who (A) didn’t break any laws and (B) pay a monthly fee for access to the entire internet. A few hours ago I was really wound up about the whole situation, but I’m settling down a bit now as new information filters in from various sources and things don’t seem quite as drastically doom-and-gloom as they did this afternoon. I’m hoping for a mutually happy resolution soon.

I’m disabling comments on this post for personal reasons you might be able to guess, so if you have something you’d like to say about this issue you’ll have to contact me privately.

Bllaca and I would like to wish a happy and prosperous new year to all our readers. Here’s to a great 2007.

Yesterday morning I was wondering how to force myself to stop playing around and get some real, non-lorem-ipsum content out into the ether. And the answer I came up with was this: invite people over. If you’re at home alone you’re much more inclined to sit around in your underwear and not worry about the dishes piling up. But if you think guests will be arriving at any moment, it’s time to take the dirty socks off the sofa and make sure there are drinks in the fridge.

So despite the blatant lack of content, I got the feeds burning and the Technorati Technorati-ing, and here you are. Welcome to the party. I’ll be back in five with the snacks.