I got a cold and it’s getting better… I just want to be healthy enough to be able to take everything on my first German lesson tomorrow. Since I spent all day in bed, I decided to be a little productive and style the comments on my blog.

I usually would go for the Highlight Author Comments plug in, but it wasn’t cutting it for what I wanted. I wanted to be able to change more than the background colour or the border in my comments. So I used a little piece of code that I found online and then messed up with it a LOT!

I had a bit of trouble with my CSS classes because they weren’t showing up so I spent all morning fixing that and I love how they look now. Also, I got rid of the threaded comments (since no one was really using them and the look was annoying me to no end) and I installed the @Reply/ w comment preview plug in to be able to answer your comments in a much simpler way.

I also figured out how to make different styles for odd and even numbered comments. It’s super easy, I can’t believe I was too lazy to figure it out before!

This is how my comments look like now:

Click to enlarge

You might also notice that I changed the font here. I got rid of  WP-Cufon and implemented @font-face in the CSS for my blog. If you’re in IE you will see that all the titles and stuff are in Arial Narrow, however, if you use any other browser, you will see that my fonts are now Bebas Neue. I really like how they look, I don’t know how to describe but I sure like that my titles and my navigation menu have rollovers available (what’s the point of programming those things when you really can’t use them?).

So, that’s what I’ve been doing all day. How’s your Friday been? Any plans for the weekend? What do you think of the little changes?

Kisses,

Julie.

Why am I so happy about this? In case you haven’t noticed, some of my lastest tweets now read “vía -juliettemaxwell.com-” like so:

vía -juliettemaxwell.com-

How does this work?

I was updating my plug ins (I always do this whenever I see that something needs to be updated) and then I saw a warning that said something along the lines of Twitter changing the way to authenticate it’s users and that I had to do some extra things to activate my Twitter Tools once again.

You just have to create your own Twitter App. YES! Your website has to become a Twitter App in order to get authenticated and use Twitter Tools. It’s super easy to get it registered, you jut have to go to Twitter Developers and register your website as an app. Note: To do this, you have to be logged in your Twitter account. You just have to fill out this form:

Registration form for your app.

You can even upload a little avatar for your website. Once you fill out this form, Twitter will provide you with some keys that you will need to authenticate your Twitter Tools. Once you fill in the appropriate data in the Twitter Tools form, you will be able to tweet from your blog as “vía -blogname-”.

That’s it! It’s super easy and takes literally 3 minutes to set up. I love this new feature, it makes me so happy to see my tweets come from my blog (when I want to use it to Tweet, which you can set up as well) and to see my posts get published in Twitter automatically in the format I like. If you have a WordPress blog, you should really give this a shot.

Now, I’m on the lookout for the perfect Facebook plugin. I’ll report my findings when I do.

Kisses,

Julie.

I suggested Concrete5 because our website is mostly informative and there are no constant updates to it. I do not know how Concrete5 would fend as a blog. I will always say that the best blogging platform is WordPress. Anyways, Concrete5 has some cool features and making themes for it is a breeze. I loved that about it.

Then I started experimenting with Blogger. To be honest, I’ve never done anything to it except change the colors with the Design options and putting a header image. I just toyed with the CSS of the Minima template (my favourite blogger template, and as I found out… super easy to play with). I’m not planning on going back to Blogger (God forbid), but it is handy to know how it works in case I have to make a template. Here are the results of my experiments, I totally based it off my website just to see if I could do it.

Also I have some random webcam pictures:

Cupcake lipgloss, I can’t open the one with the strawberry though :/

Business Cards!!! I think that I’ll change my cell phone again so that I can take better pictures

I’ll show you my nailpolish collection tomorrow. It’s become a little more extensive than I thought it was.

Kisses,

Julie.

So yeah, if you enter your question in the nifty little box that’s located on the right sidebar I’ll answer it.

Also…

How cute is Octopus Paul? I totally love him :3.

Kisses,

Julie.

This one is based off The Borrowers, it look gorgeous (like every Miyazaki Movie). I need to see it now!

Look at the trailer:

What is your favourite Studio Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki film? Mine is Howl’s Moving Castle.

Kisses,

Julie.

WRONG!

Two weeks passed and I saw on the sellers Facebook fan page that here had been some orders destroyed by her PO and that she would have to reship some international orders. A week later, I send her an email asking about my order and she didn’t answer me at all. I finally post on the Facebook fan page that I had tried to get her via email but that I had gotten no response and that I was worried about my order since it had been a month since I payed (and we even got and payed the credit card statement that came in for that month). People on the Facebook fan page tell me to email her again, so I do again and send her an Etsy convo as well.

I FINALLY GET AN ANSWER!

Since she doesn’t like to look bad in front of her fans, she answered my first email (the one I sent two weeks ago). She asked me for my PayPal email address, I give it to her (it’s my dad’s because I don’t have one) and she says that she never got my payment.

WTF?!?!

I got a PayPal receipt and my Etsy status says that my payment was received by her. I tell her these things and send her my PayPal receipt. She’s like “Oooo, I see you sent it to me”. So now she’s going to re-ship my order (which I expect to be here next week).

Maybe it’s because I’ve been scammed before, but for me her “I didn’t receive your payment” stint was like trying to scam me. specially since I ordered a month ago and I have no reason why to make up an order and never pay for it. You know, I just don’t like people who receive money, never deliver and then try to make it sound like you never payed in the first place.

I don’t think that I’ll ever order from her again, just because of this stunt. Her products have awesome reviews and I don’t doubt that my eyeshadows will make me very happy but I’m not willing to deal with someone who “loses” payments and has so much shipping drama.

What’s your favourite MMU company? Have you ever had drama when ordering online?

Kisses,

Julie.

I’m not a designer. I love design, I love aesthetics, I enjoy colors and I enjoy the geometry and math that design entails but I’m not a designer. I’m an engineer first and a Google-er second, that’s how I learn so many things that they don’t teach me at school.

When my friend’s friend asked me to help her create a magazine cover (meaning I would have to do it by myself with no input at all), I told her that I wasn’t a designer. That, yes, I knew how to use Photoshop and that I had time to do it, but that I was unsure that I could be able to deliver something that would be good enough for her class. She said it was fine, that she wanted a simple thing and told me not to worry. So, I said yes.

I have to say that I didn’t regret it at all.

How the heck do you design a magazine?

That was my biggest question. I know magazine covers and the folks over at Stylista made it seem simple enough. I just went with my instincts and used my NYLON Mexico and my ELLE for guidance. I decided to stick with what I know and use an AWESOME image. Once I had the graphics and the header done, I sent it over for approval and conitnued with the headlines and finished. It was quick and easy. I really think that my choice of image and my inexperience made me not stress over every little thing.

Here’s my cover:

Image property of Steve Prue
Found on Sam Fox’s portfolio

The headlines have nothing to do with the cover, but my friends liked it a lot so they kept it. Personally, I love it! It looks pretty awesome and to be my first cover I think that it turned out beautifully :D.

The next part was to make an ad for a backcover. I decided to use Sugarpill as the company that I would do an ad for. I used images found on their site (thus, propoerty of SugarPill) and this is what came out:

Images property of SugarPill cosmetics

I really loved it as well. It would certainly catch my attention if I saw it on a magazine :DDD.

So what do you think? Have you ever done something you didn’t know you could be good at?

Kisses,

Julie.

MrCMC (a teacher/friend of ours) told us before Spring Break about the Google Developer Fest 2010, it is a series of conferences about Google’s new technologies and you know, cool Google Stuff in general. As you know, i’m a HUUUGE Google fan, in fact, my dream job is to work at Google.

So Alekz and I moved some stuff around and we managed to get Tuesday morning free to go there. We got our invites and yesterday morning we left.

Let me tell you… Google never disappoints.

Registration and lobby

The lobby was full of puffs, chairs, and tables for you to hang around and there was free WiFi in case you wanted to do some live streaming or just tweet constantly (which is what I did). Everything was black or white with Google’s colours. It was really cool and there were loads of coffe, drinks and tasty treats to indulge ourselves.

Upon registration, you were given your conference kit. It included:

A DevFest T-shirt

Google México notepad

A Google ball point pen

Once we got our conference kits, we went to get comething to eat. I had a cup of coffee because I was so sleepy and we had cookies.

They were delicious!

While we were waiting for the keynote to start, Mido and I were standinge near a Google sign because I wanted to take a picture of her. A photographer came by and asked if he could take our picture, we said yes and started posting and just before he was going to take the picture, Alekz and Mario came by and posed with us XDD. It was so funny, then I asked him to take a picture of the 4 of us with my camera. He was really nice and took our picture n_n.

YAY!

We didn’t stay the whole day, we just made it to 3-4 conferences (we split and Mido ended up going to one extra conference) but it was so awesome. During the keynote we met all of the conferencists and what they were talking about. The Google Mexico director was there and we saw loads of demos about Android, Google Engine App, Google Webkit Apps, Google Wave, Google Maps and Earth, Google Chrome, HTML 5, CSS3 and loads of other things. The speakers talked mostly in English and it was just awesome! I really enjoyed the keynote. It was so much fun lo listen to everyone speak and show demos.

After the keynote, we had a bit of a resting period and while Mido and Mario went to the Google Geographic stuff, Alekz and I went to the Cloud Computing conference. It was good, they talked about the Google App Engine and how you can make really powerful applications using Google’s infraestructure, they also talked about merchandising your app. It was very cool, it would’ve been cooler if the wireless connection didn’t fail big time.

After that, we went to look for Mido but we couldn’t find her, so Alekz and I went to get our lunchbox (courtesy of Google) and then we found Mido. This is what was inside my luchbox:

It was junk food, but it was good. Unfortunately, my wisdom tooth started hurting and I couldn’t finidh my baguette T_T. We ate and we were planning to leave, but Mido saw that the parking fee went flat after 5 hours so we decided to stay and go to the Android conference. It was really interesting, but I was tired and very sleepy so I fell asleep during the last few minutes. After that conference we left and I took mido with me to school, then I hung out there a little bit and went home.

Google, I love you!! I do, I do, I dooooooo.

I just changed my theme (again! Seriously, it never ends with me ;P ). I have to say that I’m actually really proud of what I did with this one. I think that it is my best one yet.

This theme works better on Safari and Firefox, Chrome renders the CSS3 well, but it doesn’t look as pretty and IE won’t show any of the CSS3 pretties or any of the fancy fonts. I think that my design classes are paying off, what do you think? I’m not a designer but the theme doesn’t look half bad. I coded it all by myself, did the header and background using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and I tested it using WAMP server and Firefox.

Initially, I was going to use EasyPHP to install my local server and MySQL database but it just wouldn’t work with my Windows 7. I really don’t know what the problem was but it just wouldn’t let me install neither WordPress nor Drupal (I’m starting to delve into a it a bit, I still can’t figure it out :/), so I changed to WAMP. It worked like a charm and I can develop anything I want n_n. I decided to use a three column layout just to see if I could make it work. I did a lot of internet research and combined loads of tutorials to accomplish the two sidebars. I wanted to make a custom date format with different fonts and stuff but I just got frustrated by the CSS and HTML, so I dropped it for now. I had no patience, I might keep tweaking this theme until I accomplish it.

I like the new header, I used some light textures that I found in deviantART (when I find the exact source I’ll post it here) to get the finish that I wanted. I really wanted a calm and subdued colour palette that didn’t make anyone’s retinas burn when they visited the website. The custom fonts are from dafont.com and they work thanks to the WP-Cufon plugin. I’m also adding new plugins for future features so expect loads of new things as well.

I’m so excited for this! I love making themes and coding, so if you want to ask anything or see how we can collaborate for your blog or website send me an email or contact me.

So tell me…

Do you like the new theme?

First some things: this is the bag that I carry when I’m not in school. When I got to school I change between 2 book bags (depending on whether I’m carrying my laptop or not) and I carry a lot more stuff with me.

So, what’s in my bag?

  My bag is white and pink Puma shoulder bag that I got in Spain back in 2008. It was incredibly cheap (like 12 Euro) and since then, it has become my favourite going out bag.

Inside my puma bag I carry:

• Lip Balm: This one is Beauty Rush by Victoria’s Secret. My sister got it for me when she was in San Diego. I love that lip balm because it is a gloss too. It sparkles and it is so refreshing
• Hand Lotion: I don’t like having dry hands and mine tend to scar and get all scale like and it’s not pretty
• Hand Sanitizer: AH1N1? Enough said. I also hate having my hands dirty. I wash them like at least 15 times a day
• Tissues: Special tissues for people with colds. I tend to get sick a lot, or get allergies
• Frame glasses: Just in case I lose a contact or something
• Contact lenses solution: Just in case I need to take my contacts off or something
• Contact lenses case: Just in case

• Wallet: Includes little money and ID’s
• Moleskine: 2010 Horizontal Weekly Planner. I have my life planned in that thing
• Pencil: Nightmare before Christmas, to write on the Moleskine
• USB Key: you never know when you might need one
• Sunglasses: Oh, the joys of wearing sunglasses and being able to see where you’re going at the same time!
• Cell Phone: A BlackJack II in a pink silicone case. I love that cell phone
• iPod Touch

Not pictured:

• Keys
• Camera

Now that I use the contacts I carry around more stuff, but it’s worth it because I love not wearing my frames.

Kisses,

Julie.