The view from my lunch table during my hour-long break from work.

Tomorrow marks one month since I’ve started my new job.  After being unemployed since the end of spring, I am quite thankful to be working full time again!

I work in Van Nuys and have an easy commute on the Metro Red Line and Orange Line.  I live 8 minutes from a Red Line stop and my office building is literally right at an Orange Line stop.  It’s a very busy area with lots of businesses, and as such, lots of fast food places.  After spending about 3 weeks eating junk and wasting money, I found a park 2 blocks away and now spend my lunch hour at a picnic table eating food I brought.

My position is basically e-commerce and website management for a small company that sells products on 3 separate websites.  Two of the sites are bicycle motors and related bicycle parts.  The other site sells outdoor advertising targeted towards business owners.  My responsibilities include managing online inventory, adding new products to the website, creating new web pages and graphics, and online marketing such as Google AdWord campaigns and email blasts.  So far, I have been extremely busy.  Except for lunch, I am basically working straight from the minute I get in at 9 until I leave at 6.

I have been adding a lot of new products to the websites, a task that includes taking and editing photos for the products. I’ve also had to go in and make updates to many of the current products.  At the same time, I’m trying to make sure inventory levels are accurate so we don’t sell something that is out of stock while monitoring affiliate emails, wholesale inquiries, AdWord campaigns and our various product feeds on sites like Shopzilla and PriceGrabber.  There are other things I have to do, such as customer newsletters, company blog, new site design, and a Black Friday campaigns that I have gotten around to yet.  Like I said - extremely busy.  I usually leave work exhausted.

To make matters worse, I leave work after 8 hours of coding, come home, walk the dogs, eat something, and then it’s back to coding on side projects I’m working on for myself. I’m currently trying to learn MySQL and get a better grasp on Javascript. I’ve noticed lately that my vision has been getting blurry and thought my prescription had change. I even went in for an eye exam.  Turns out that I’m just spending too much time staring at small text on a computer screen.  I’m trying to be more careful and give my eyes a break now and then.  Sites I use to go on all the time, like Digg, Facebook, and Twitter, are hardly on my radar anymore.  I also barely blog now as you may have noticed.

I enjoy being busy but I already feel as if I already need a vacation!  I’m going to welcome “going” to work tomorrow.  It’ll mean waking up and moving about 10 feet to my computer.  I’m designing a 2-page magazine ad for some of our products.  We don’t have Illustrator and Photoshop at work so  I get to stay home and do the work here.  Yay! I hope I’m able to get most of it done tomorrow.  The deadline is the end of the week - gulp!

Okay, that’s it for now.  I really need some sleep.

Inspired by my friend Alex Boroda, I’m starting a new category of entries called “What I Learned Today.”  Let’s see how long I keep it up.

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In Firefox, my visited links weren’t changing to match my CSS. They looked fine in IE. Now I know from (a very frustrating) past experience that order is very important in your stylesheet. Your link styles should be listed in the order a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active. I created a mnemonic device to help me: Las Vegas Hawaii. Wedding in Las Vegas, honeymoon in Hawaii.

So anyway, I knew this wasn’t the issue because it’s something I’ve since been very conscious about. So what else could it be, and why the heck was it working in IE and not Firefox? In trying to find the answer, I went to other sites that had working visited links in IE and looked at them in Firefox. They didn’t work in Firefox either! What this meant is that it wasn’t my stylesheet—it was my browser! Yay!

I looked at my browser settings and still didn’t see anything that would prevent my style from working. I had the “Allow pages to choose their own fonts…” option checked, so now what? After some more searching on Google, I found the culprit.

My visited links weren’t working in Firefox because my browser was set to save 0 days worth of browsing history. What this means is that Firefox didn’t make a list of the links I’ve clicked, of the pages I’ve visited. So of course, it didn’t turn my regular links to visited links because to Firefox there are no visited links. Duh!

I changed my settings to 1 day, went back to my page, started clicking links again and—Voila!—it was right as rain.

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The WP Email Notification Plugin does not work with Wordpress 2.3 or above it seems. I’m currently running Wordpress 2.6.3. Subscribe2 is a good replacement.

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When desiring to do a blog entry called “What I Learned Today,” it is best to make a list as you go along instead of trying to remember it all at the end of the day.