Cathy K Web and Design
cathyk web and design

MY BLOG

Sloggin'

This is a diary, if you will, of my major learning projects from 2018 and on, in chronological order more or less. If they’re listed here, it means I spent way too many hours to get something right.

I regret that I didn’t put dates for the early items as I was struggling with ...

 

Today's tidbit for Mastodon

As a casual #Minecraft player (when all the chores are finally done), I’d love to know how many billions of dollars have been generated by this amazing game. In addition to Microsoft’s game sales, Realms hosting, merchandising, and marketplace, consider all the developers, designers, ...

 

I'll tell you what they're good for

Blogs are cool if you’re disciplined enough to post interesting material regularly. I’m not and I don’t even have that much to say. Thankfully, I have been pretty disciplined in learning to build one.

This website is actually a WordPress website. It doesn’t really ...

 

Mastodon

Submitted by cathyk       November, 16, 2022

Mastadon

Mastodon

I’m not too crazy about the new management over at Twitter. I thought I’d check out Mastadon. I’m so tired of rich narcissists messing up the things I like.

update: I like Mastodon. It’s ...

 

My contact form works again!

TL;DR – My AWS Lightsail Ubuntu 20.04 OS-only instance server would not allow emails to be sent from a PHPMailer/OAuth2 contact form to my Google Workspaces Gmail inbox. Some resources that helped me fix the problem are at the bottom of this post. Bear with me, ...

 

AWS

Submitted by cathyk       October, 9, 2021

The AWS Experience

Just over three years ago, I opened a Reseller web hosting account with Hostgator. A three-year plan was quite reasonable at the introductory price, but three years later, with a renewal at the standard price of around $1200 bucks looming, I started feeling pressured to get out of ...

 

The best Emma. ever

This is my favorite Emma movie, and I think I’ve seen them all being a huge Jane Austen fan. This Emma character is more entitled and less down-to-earth than the other movie Emmas. She’s not going to pick her own flowers from her hothouse – she’s going to have her servant ...

 

GME!

Submitted by cathyk       March, 19, 2021

GME!

I’d never paid much attention to financial and stock market news, but after following the GameStop saga for these past months, I see mainstream financial news outlets as nothing but market manipulation machines – owned or influenced by powerful financial institutions. Nearly every ...

 

A milestone

This website has been ‘under construction’ for about two years. Crazy, I know.

I’ve felt tremendous pressure while building my own website as a website designer. A web designer’s website should be scrutinized. I would think a sloppy website is a red flag ...

 

The real house is a mess but the Minecraft house rocks!
Minecraft 3-story house

If I’d had a blog while building our family Minecraft server, I could have documented the entire process while it was fresh in my mind. This may have actually been useful to someone.

This project started in the summer of 2019. I envisioned the a perfect Minecraft server where the ...

 

Bring your b-cells

Here’s a project I started a few months ago – a Godfather trivia quiz for the diehard fan. This is a work in progress. Someday, I plan to publish an interactive quiz on my website.

It’s hard! Can you answer some of these questions without cheating? I wrote down ...

 

Another list...

I’ve been maintaining this list on my iPad for a couple years now. I needed over five blog posts to test my paginations and taxonomies so I thought this was worthy of a post.

In no particular order, some amazing, well-done movies, and some that are merely a comfort to ...

 

Good stuff

Another favorites list. I’ve watched most of these series multiple times except where noted.

  • The Good Wife
  • The Sopranos
  • Mr. Robot
  • Silicon Valley
  • Veep
  • Veronica Mars
  • Ugly Betty
  • Mad Men
  • Buffy the Vampire ...

 

A hasty list of favorites

I’ll feel dumb later when I think of all the music I’ve forgotten, but I’ll add them as I remember them.

Listing favorite albums is tricky. I’ve tried to think of the albums that have stood the test of time. The older albums here are ones that I’ve spent many ...

 

Another "filler" post but worthy of attention

Once upon a midnight dreary
while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some ...

 

First post

Submitted by cathyk       February, 23, 2020

Populating the blog

For learning and testing purposes, I’ve seeded my blog with some pretty flimsy posts. I’ll have some actual posts ...