What on earth is polishing peanuts?
Ian Anderson
I thought you might ask that! Polishing peanuts is a saying which means ‘to work very hard at something for little or no reward’. Perfect for this little blog!
I used this domain as a practice site when I first started out, as it described exactly how I felt! Later, when I looked around for a more ‘suitable’ domain, I had kind of got to like polishing peanuts, so here we are.
But what’s it for?
Fun! Polishing peanuts is a blog, a plaything, a site to experiment with and use as a starting point for various projects and random stray thoughts. Mostly related to life, practical stuff or travel/humanitarian issues but with the odd bit of emergency planning thrown in too.
Who am I?
I am a 41 year old chap that is interested in just about everything! An incurable autodidact, which basically means that I love teaching myself new stuff! (OK, OK, I admit it, I am a book worm!)
Technically though, I am a builder by trade but I also love carpentry, the internet, meeting interesting people, travel, writing, growing stuff and trying to look after my family in between. I also have a masters degree in Trauma and Disaster Management, which I took to try and make sense of my experiences working in East Africa.
My specialism, has evolved into working for discerning clients, looking after their often considerable homes, providing high quality services and also the restoration of old brickwork using traditional lime mortars. I also provide occasional consultancy services to aid based construction projects in East Africa. For example; I went to Rwanda with the Conservative Party a little while back which was a great trip.
I moved to Norway in April 2010 after 18 months in New Zealand, where I looked after my family and a hectare of lovely countryside, trying not to paddle too much chicken poop into the house, waging a long and bloody war on garden snails and aiming to grow vegetables faster than weeds!
To keep occupied(!) I am learning how the internet is screwed together and how it all works, hence the polishing peanuts feeling sometimes. It’s a work in progress…….
Feel free to send me an email about this site, or anything else for that matter. If you are a spammer though, or overly rude, I’ll have my men track you down………….
Stay well,
Flip Over Saw Stuff
Guide
Volunteer
XJ Coupe
Hi Scott,
Thanks for getting back to me.
Yes, shame that I fell in ‘love’ with a theme, did a bunch of tweeking and got it just how I wanted it. Then came a bit of expansion and WTF! no menu that works!
I guess that there are plugins that will put pages into a widget or a re-write of the code to make it work as you so rightly say.
For the moment though I am using links on the parent page but thinking long term it would be nice to use wordpress as a ‘website’/CMS and have a proper menu at the top ‘a la’ most regular websites.
In the future I’ll look at it again (when my patience with it returns!) and I’ll probably look you up again Scott and hit the wallet and sort it out. I used to do simple css menus before I ‘discovered’ wordpress but would be unsure how to ‘fit’ it all into the theme to work properly.
Coo, going on a bit! So Scott, thanks again for getting back to me and for helping out, appreciate it.
Cheers
Ian
Ian, Got your question on VSEllis.com but you left no email address for me to reach you! I assume by “child pages” you are wanting drop-downs from your navigation. If your theme doesn’t natively support it it will require a fair amount of code to make work. Many, if not most themes have it built in but it’s a bit beyond the scope of a smiple question to implement, particularly without knowing the in’s and out’s of your theme. Sorry that isn’t more help. You’ll need a bunch of CSS and someone that knows how to manipulate that css to suit your theme to get it to work so it’s not quite as simple as just “drop in this code.”
There are many WP Pro’s for hire (including me) to do things like that if you need. Sorry that isn’t a better answer, if it was simple as “plug this in and it’ll work” I’d throw it right to you!