Hi All, just a quick note to let everyone know I will be hosting the last chat at ReneePearson.com chatting live at Sunday 8PM Standard Time, 16 hours from now. That will be at 10AM Monday for me, I am on GMT +10 ;) Got to the website, register/sign up and go to the ReneeTV link. Bring your hybrid questions! Also, sign up for the Epson printer giveaway, you still have 8 hours until the giveway is closed and we will be announcing the winner during my chat :)

WARNING: Just wanted to let everyone know: 4shared has been hacked. It has been redirecting everyone to another website for the last five hours or so. I hope by the time you read this it is all ok again,but being a weekend it might take some time. The hacker's website doesn't look like it is doing anything at the moment, they might have done it to just prove they can do it, not sure. In the meantime, all my freebie links are not working, sorry! Will try to keep you posted.

UPDATE: 4shared seems to be back to normal :) yay! (just the thought of having to reupload all the freebies got me tired LOL)

I have never thought much about my blog until I lost it, never had tags, categories, etc. This blog has been a little different and I have been working on these little things to help navigation and to just help people find what they are looking for. A couple of things:

Users: I have actually set up two users for this account, one is the admin (Withlovebymushy) and the other is me (Michellefilo). If you click on the name of the user under each post you will get all the posts by that specific user. Why do I have two users? To separate a little my scrapbooking from everything else. So Withlovebymushy has all the scrapbooking/designing related posts, and Michellefilo posts about everything else (family, photos, gaming, personal stuff).  It's still just me, so they may overlap a little :)

Categories and Tags: they are on the left hand side and make it easier for you to find pages related to specific topics. The difference is that my categories are set and I don't plan on creating many more. Tags will vary according to the content of each post, so many might be added with time. Some people are going to find it very useful as they come here after something specific. For example, for all freebies, click on freebies, for all my Pencil Lines pages, click on Pencil lines, and so on and so forth.

Sharing: At the end of each post you can see options to e-mail the post, or to post it on your Facebook, Dzone or del.icio.us accounts. If there are any others you would like added just let me know. I am specially happy with the Facebook one :)

Subscription services: On the left navigator I have set up subscription options with a couple of feed tracking services and also an e-mail notification with feedburner. In the future, I might use the e-mails subscribed from feedburner to send a newsletter with news and freebies :)

Gallery: I am working on adding my projects to the Gallery. I have a lot of digital and paper pages already uploaded. Hybrid projects are uploaded but no descriptions yet. The gallery is a little bit messy because it has albums with LOTS of images, like the digital scrapbooking album, but also has little albums with 2 images of a single project. I needed to be able to create sub galleries (like the sets in flickr, but I didn't just say that). So I am not sure if I will continue to update the gallery or just post the photos on the blog posts and hope people are able to find them (let me know what you prefer).

Pages: on the left nav under "interesting stuff" I will have a couple of pages. Well, to start with, there is the page about me and the page with a list of publications where I was published, but everything is a work in progress :)

Lots of links: On the left nav I also have links to most of my creative team friends, blog friends, my online galleries, etc. My blog list is huge but still not one third of the blogs I visit, I just never get around to updating (and pruning) it.

and I am sure I will think of other things to add, but feedback on these features and what you would like to see on the blog would be greatly appreciated!

and ermm... here is a little eye candy because... just because :)

Made with awesome new goodies from the Lilypad March BYOC and yes, the Free Spirit Alpha from CD Muckosky (my 2009 album will have A LOT of pages with this alpha LOL).

I have been feeling a little sick lately, maybe it is a stomach bug, but my (27yo) little brother is here, so that sure is cheering me up! We are playing World of Warcraft every night!!!

xoxo

Whoever has my voodoo doll, can you please just drop it? LOL

My computer did not work at all today until late night. After I dropped off Mateus for his first day of school (it was great, by the way) I came home thinking I could use those two hours to finish a couple of things to prepare for getting back to work tomorrow.

Turn on the computer, it starts loading and... black screen... maybe it was just a hic up, try again. Nothing...  Shut down, I get the option of logging into safe mode… it hangs while trying to load windows!

I was pretty confused, last thing I was doing was editing photos last night and now windows won’t load. I thought maybe it was a monitor configuration problem (like it happened three weeks ago, when I had to replace my monitor). So I got the other monitor (the one that is flickering)... Nothing. Disconnected everything from the computer, tried everything, called hubby and whined about it. Finally I gave up and did a system restore, fully aware of the repercussions, but they worked out even worst than I expected.

It took me till lunch time to get the computer to even load windows. I went to pick up Mateus and came back to try to log into the internet, another drama. I had to wait until Alex got here at 6:30 PM to fix it for me, and it took him (an IT expert) a good half hour.

Now, all my software is here, but it isn’t. Since the registry was reset I lost a lot of stuff. My fonts are in the fonts folder but the computer won’t recognize them and won’t let me install then again, which is the case with a lot of the software. My address book disappeared, my e-mail accounts set up are gone (but I didn’t lose any e-mails). My folders are intact, the only good news. Even my back up external HDs are not being recognised by my computer at the moment, so I don't have acces to my pages/designs/kits/etc. 

We figured this is the same pain as buying a new computer, so I will try to back up everything and my beloved husband has offered to give me his MAC and he will reformat this computer and rebuild it for him.
 
All, this to say, hang in there, photos of Mateus first day of school still to come. Wish me luck getting the computer gremlins away, I sure had enough :)

Yep, here in Australia is Monday and it is a holiday where we celebrate Australia :) Find out more about it here (and the hilarious commercial ad).

We had a VERY Australian day at home with friends and in front of the BBQ. We had sausages (the kids love them) and Australia shaped burgers (seriously, looky here). I gave the kids flags to "play" with so I could take photos marking the day, but they were not very insterested. Best photo I got was this one:

(love the look on Lucas' face, but by the time Matty warmed to the camera Lucas ran off, LOL)

Talking about photos, I have decided where my images are going, YAY. We are still implementing it but at least now I have an idea of what to do. Let's see if it will work.

My family photos will be hosted at our family website, which was neglected for over a year but now I am going to do some work on it (and make mother in law and mommy very happy hehehe). It certainly needs a little updating! I have deleted all my 2007-08 photos from there, but it was because there was way too many to look through. So now I am going to try and be more selective when I upload so there is no need to delete in the future.

For my project photos, and all scrapbooking imagery this is the place, I am going to host everything here and Alex is working on the photo gallery at the moment (he also created the one on our website). He wants to keep the look and feel similar to this blog engine, and so far I think it is working pretty good, you can see the gallery link at the top or you can go here.)

Have a great week :)

My niece was born yesterday, Isabella, my first niece. I am so happy to have a little baby girl to spoil, dress up (play doll), send little dresses, dolls, make pigtails, take girly photos and .... scrap :)  She wasn't due until next month so it was a bit of a surprise, I got very teary and it finally sank in I was going to be an aunt. It is hard when you are away from your family, I thought about her a little bit but it was more like "my sister in law is pregnant" thought than anything else. I am so happy for them and for our ever growing family. My kids' first little cousin :) Shame we are so far away and plans are only to visit next year, she will be over one year old by then. Tis' life! Let's enjoy the bright side!

I feel like I got nothing crossed off my "to do" list today, but I have been so busy at the same time, Just beyond sidetracked, I get sidetracked so easily, and this blog is just THE place to get sidetracked. I am not posting my products and pages today. I am not posting them until I figure out how to have a web gallery. I want to post a little thumbnail of the page here and you should be able to click on it and go to another page to see the credits. I am ok with what I did for the tutorial, but I don't want that for my pages! I am trying lots of different options (zenphotos, picasa, smugmug, etc) and can't make up my mind (or make them work). I just wish flickr haven't made my life so damn difficult! But let's not go there again LOL

I forgot to mention here on the blog I got my broadband connection back! Why do you think there are tutorials on this blog :) I couldn't do it before. I was using a prepaid mobile connection that I swear felt worse than dial up. So I will be able to do lots of things online that I missed, including visiting my friend's blogs and leaving some love in the galleries (not that I really have any spare time LOL)

Please cross your finger for me next week. The sale of our house was supposed to go through today but the bank said they needed more paperwork. So we didn't get the extra money, will have to pay the old house's mortgage for a couple more days AND we had to allow the new owners to move in because is not their fault, so we are paying for their mortgage at the moment.

This post is getting too wordy and long for not enough eye candy, so let me finish by wishing you a great weekend! Here is a long weekend with a holiday on Monday and we are going to have a much needed quiet one, maybe I will get more stuff done :)

xoxo

all fixed thanks to Heather! I am glad it wasn't something silly I have done or missed, it as a known bug with blogengine.NET :)

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I know, I have no feed for this blog YET. I was pretty sure the one I had was working but it is not, and I don't know if there is some step I missed on setting up the blog or if I have to create the feed from scratch. I just spent over an hour searching the net and I am 100% the answer must be really simple, since I can't find anything online explaining what I should do :) If anyone has any knowledge of this stuff can you pleeeeease help :) Right now I have to go to bed because it is waaaaay too late, but tomorrow hopefully I will get a feed working :)

Welcome to my new home on the world wide web! Please excuse the dust while we make some adjustments to the new place!

Happy 2009! To new beginnings!