Welcome to the new software version of my website...

Some will have noticed: It was only last weekend that we finally found the time to upgrade my Joomla to the newest version. It was a darn hard battle and I can't thank my dearest, sweet husband enough for sacrificing his whole Sunday for bughunting. Same on Monday evening.

Not everything works as intended yet and there are many new options we have to find and finetune to my liking (e.g. those additional menus which currently take up space everywhere), but overall I'm quite happy to be up to date again. Surely you will run into the occasional problem here and there, which is also due to me switching data around.
Over the next days/weeks some things will change about my category layout to make it easier to find things and prepare the website for the content I finally want to start publishing!

There is a new category named "Stories & Comics". This isn't really new, but it's a new starting point to collect all my stories, photo funnies and everything NON-Seekers I do. Dolltopia already moved there. The German version of my website now features a brandnew epic Sims4 soap opera, but that content will only be available in German. I'm sorry I don't have more content for my international pals lately, but I just can't translate prose. I really do my best with Dolltopia, but that story just has waaay to many words and translated with my skills it would just be bad and no fun for me.
While updating old data and moving things around I WILL try to translate some things I didn't come around to earlier, but it's a slow process.

Speaking of Dolltopia, that is NOT dead, on the contrary it will be continued soon. Seekers is still dead for the time being, since we still haven't found a house or apartment to buy and move to. Times are chaotic still, but don't give up on me, I don't either. ;)

To my sorrow, updating the website is currently frozen due to technical issues, although I actually have a lot of things to share right now.

Background: A short while ago, Russian spammers found a security leak in our ancient Joomla which allowed them to send spam mails with my name to other Russians via my server. So we had no other choice but to finally upgrade the software. A migration to the most recent Joomla failed several times, though, although we followed the instructions to a point. So we decided to take a step inbetween and for the time being upgraded to the final version of Joomla 2.5 (which is without support since the end of 2014, actually - due to all the illnesses, change of job and moving we really let this drag out!).

While that fixed the security leak, it brought new problems. The websites' skin was broken and isn't 100% fixed by now. Translations have become much more cumbersome because the translation module doesn't work right with this version. And - as I had to find out yesterday - all galleries stopped working on the English version of the website. I'm so sorry about that! We're trying to find the bug for a day now, but although we know now where the problem comes from we still can't fix it because we don't know WHY it happens. With 99% certainty this is another problem from the translation module.

Sadly my husband has a tight schedule this month, but we'll still try to migrate the website to Joomla 3 again on Feb. 18. It's quite possible that the website won't work that day and probably won't work 100% on the following days either. If the migration works this time we don't have to worry about this junk for some years - a Joomla 4 isn't likely to come out soon and we hope not every small update will create problems like these.
Then I can finally fix some things on this website, especially for the international viewers.
I don't want to think about what happens if we don't manage to get the migration done... Ugh.

Since we still haven't found a house to buy the year keeps being as stressful as the last and I still won't have that much time to work on this. I do my best.

I hope everyone had a merry Xmas and wish you all a happy New Year!

Over here, things are chaotic, as usual. Perhaps you noticed how my website went bonkers for a day a while ago - that was our try to update Joomla to the latest version. Afterwards NOTHING worked anymore, no matter what we tried, so we kept uploading our backup and trying again. But nothing worked. After the update all translations were broken and depending on your browser everything was either German or English and the gallery was gone altogether.

By now we are on a middle version which seemingly only broke the skin, which my husband fixed quite quickly. But just now, when I wanted to work on the galleries and finally upload a bunch of photos, I had to notice that the translation buttons went missing. As I see now that's the case for articles, too. Oh Joy. So currently my only means of adding English translations is by cumbersome tricks and so I'm afraid I have to postpone all updates. :( Luckily my husband is on holiday now, so I hope he can take a look at that in a timely fashion.
In any case, we'll try to upgrade to the newest Joomly again sometime soon, so don't be shocked if the website is a mess again one day. It can't stay technically in 2014 forever.
In the worst case I'll have to find out in what way the multilangual feature of the new Joomly is supposed to work (their instructions are utterly bad, if you can find some at all!) and put in all English texts anew.

Overall the annual balance of this website is shockingly bad. Such few updates here! I'm mega displeased, especially since we still didn't find a house to buy so far! So next year we'll start house hunting right again, and thanks to the translation problem I can't even do some quick updates to better my stats before the year ends.

There are good news too, though! We bought a 3D printer which already helps me with the board game section. But not only that, it also is a tremendous help for the doll house and thus will help me continue Dolltopia! Finally I'm not dependent on my questionable talents with a fretsaw anymore, phew! I also have some plans for other sections, but I don't want to talk about that yet. Only downside is, I still have to learn a lot about my various 3D programs to make my own things instead of just downloading them.

Regarding board games, there will be quite some content later, because we got so many new games we haven't even tested them all yet!

Overall I only prepared stuff in the background lately, though. There is a new custom doll for Dolltopia in the works (for the first time I make shoes, oh my!), several dozen pieces of doll clothing were sewn or made to fit from other doll lines, I screen and restore old terrain pieces from our tabletop days for future games and as backgrounds for the galleries. Sometimes I even plug in the graphics tablet and draw a bit, but for the most part I paint miniatures and terrain. There's also roughly 10 articles about various topics which are still unpublished because I'm missing the photos for them. Oh well, next year I'll get them done! To be honest, there are also some articles which still need translation, as they are only available in German so far.

Just when you start to think you're almost done... :P

I was almost done cutting all miniatures for our freshly bought boardgame "Shadows of Brimstone" from their sprues and gluing them together, when we found a shop that still had some currently out of stock items in stock. And whoooooooooosh, my whole desk is lost under a pile of stuff again. Oh well!

Actually, I don't have anything substantial to tell today. We looked at another house that wasn't a match for us, we had a long weekend with a holiday that was ruined by constand noise from a festival, but who wants to read that?!

The new server runs like a charm, the old one will be shut down soon and so far we DIDN'T manage to upgrade this here website to the latest software version. There will definitely be some more hickups and downtimes while we have to test stuff. So no all-clear yet!

Still, I tinker a bit here and there, also to find more potential problems. (For instance, in the beginning I had no admin rights to upload photos to the system, he he.) But there's nothing super duper to tell about - our whole life wraps around hunting for a nice house and preparing to move.
That I paint miniatures right now is actually just a shot at getting some old paint pots empty and get some order into the collection. I also crochet a bit to use up wool. I sew a bit to use up... you know. Somehow I do whatever I stumble over, and I don't have one ounce of free brain capacity to actually plan anything. I believe if finally find a house that matches us and is within budget I'll get a stroke. If I survive that and we're done moving, renovating and unpacking I guess I'll bother you all the time with countless updates. :P