In a quest for co-ordinating clothing for the wedding party, we’ve arranged a couple of shopping days with the bridesmaids and best men in late March and early April. The best men day was harder to organise than you’d imagine, as one best man is only in the UK for a few weeks between now and the wedding, and the other is a newly-qualified doctor and therefore works silly numbers of hours. The bridesmaids day was also challenging, as it involved getting the four of them, plus Paul and I, to all find a suitable weekend, as well as a location accessible by all. In the end, we’ve settled on Aberdeen, the Granite City - rather appropriate, given the colour of the suits we’re looking for!

The dress has landed. :)

I’m very pleased with the colour, as I had been worried it would be too dark. It doesn’t look great on me at the moment, as it doesn’t fit me too well so needs some alterations, and it’s also creased from being packed in a box, but hopefully it’ll all be fine by September!

Plans for the reception are vague (to say the least) at this stage, but we took the first step today by getting an up-to-date list of menus from the zoo caterer. It’s all rather posh, but we’re confident we’ll arrange something to suit all tastes, even Paul’s predilection for junk food…

I received an email yesterday to let me know that my wedding dress is ready and has been dispatched, so it should arrive within the next fortnight. This was a pleasant surprise as I was told it could take up to four months, but it’s taken less than one :)

Yes, I ordered my dress online. I wasn’t intending to, it just sort of happened. Y’see, I tried on the dress in a local bridal shop, loved it, but didn’t like the shop as the service wasn’t very good, and I felt nervous and uncomfortable there. I won’t name and shame it as it wasn’t terrible, but I will mention that the Wedding Outlet in Orpington (no website, search Yell if you want more details) was my favourite shop, as they were so relaxed and friendly there. They also had quite a nice range of dresses, just not ‘the one’ :)

Anyway, I thought I’d try to find another shop locally with the dress - no joy there, but while I was looking I found an American website who did sell it. It turned out that the dress I wanted came from America anyway, so it made sense to buy from there, especially because of the price. I would’ve been paying a three-figure sum at the bridal shop, but thanks to Bush Jr screwing up the US economy and the dollar, it ended up costing a two-figure sum (including postage) from the website. Mmm, bargain hunting…

By the way, the dress is officially a bridesmaid’s dress but still looks the part, and no, it’s not white. I’m very tempted to post a link to a picture of it, but that would ruin the surprise, and anyway, the model looks better in it than I do ;)

This weekend has felt like a bit of a waste, insofar as we’ve barely left the house, but I’ve actually got quite a lot done towards the wedding.

Yesterday I created some admin tools for Edith and I (and potentially anyone else labelled as an Administrator) to use on the web site, the most important being a bulk e-mail system that lets us choose select groups of people to send messages to, such as ‘All guests intending to take the coach’, ‘Everyone who has said they’re not sure if they’re coming or not’ and ‘All vegetarians’. Not only that but we can also use it to do some mail merge-type stuff with names, acceptance statuses and so forth. Never before had I seen just how much fun it would be to be a spammer ;)

Today I’ve been designing, and working out the printing practicalities of, the invitations. It seems that for relatively small (sub-100) runs of A5 postcard-type invitations, it’s very hard to find anywhere that will print them, and expensive when you do. So difficult and expensive is it that we’ve ended up instead placing an order for several printer ink cartridges and plenty of high-quality printer paper on the basis that we can make just as good a job of it, for a lot less money, by doing it ourselves.

This approach also gets around the worry of how to feed the invitations through the printer in order to overprint people’s names, guest IDs and passwords: the whole invitation can be produced from the database now - hurrah!

Unfortunately what I haven’t done this weekend is get beyond a momentary consideration of how on earth to go about setting up our online Wedding List system. It’s pretty much all that stands between now and the site being able to go live - and thus the invitations being able to be sent and the whole thing generally kicking off properly - but it’s a rather daunting obstacle. Which rather suggests that I should get back to it instead of posting to the dlog, really, doesn’t it? :)

On the way to an interview for a Masters course at UCL, I popped into the Westminster Registry Office to confirm our registrar booking. Good to know I’ve got my priorities right, eh? :)

I had to hand over our authorities to marry - a pair of documents we’d obtained from our local council by answering a few questions and giving them some money. I was also meant to pay Westminster their registrar fees, but I’d forgotten my chequebook and the luddites don’t take cards, so I’m posting that off on Monday instead.

Anyway, what this means is that there’s definitely going to be a wedding, hurrah! While I was there, they gave me some info about the wording of the ceremony itself. Basically, the only rules are that you have to incorporate two sections by law (one saying you’re not breaking the law by marrying each other, and the other saying you’re marrying each other) and the rest can be whatever you like as long as it’s non-religious and your registrar agrees to it. The freedom is slightly daunting, although at least they’ve given us four sample ceremony wordings to give us an idea of what to do :)

Music is something else it’d be nice to have at the ceremony - unfortunately, I emailed one possible ensemble about a month ago enquiring about availability and prices, and have heard nothing back. Time to do more research, I guess…

OK, maybe calling it a wed site is a step too far - we already have this ‘dlog’, after all.

Anyway, I’m pleased with the progress I’m making on the main zoolyweds web site, which should be finished by the time you read this, since we’re not planning to tell anyone about this dlog until everything’s ready, hopefully by the end of the month. I have so far prepared the home page, the guest list page, the guest info page, the login and ‘view site as someone else’ systems and all the panels that appear down the sides of the pages, so there’s still plenty more to do, but Edith’s been writing text for the ‘where to stay’ page and I’ve got a full day today to get stuck in to working on the site.

For those of you who are interested in such things, the zoolyweds site is written in PHP 5 with a database back-end. (If this means nothing to you, skip this paragraph and the next one :) ) The database, I’m afraid, is only a Microsoft Access job, connecting via ODBC, because we’re actually hosting the zoolyweds site here in our living room, running Apache 2 on Windows 2000 (which I may or may not risk upgrading to XP before the site goes live). This means we can quickly and easily edit and add to the database as needed, but on the down side it also means the site is a little on the slow side and at the mercy of our ADSL connection (although as far as I’m aware that hasn’t caused any downtime in the two weeks I’ve been developing, so that’s good.) Oh, I knew there had to be another plus side - it also means it can be properly hosted at the www.zoolyweds.co.uk domain, rather than just redirected there (like this dlog.zoolyweds.co.uk subdomain).

We are going to pay out a small amount of money to have the web redirection service for dlog.zoolyweds.co.uk hosted outside our living room, so regardless of the whims of our in-house hosting you’ll always be able to get to this dlog via this address. If you find the main site unavailable for any surprising length of time, I suggest checking this dlog for info.

Anyway, enough technical stuff - if any non-technically minded person is still reading this, I recommend a quick visit to the far less jargon-ridden zoolyweds Help page for info and assistance with using that site, and hopefully you’ll find that it’s all rather less complicated than I may have made it sound in my geek-propelled excitement.

I hope everyone enjoys using these web sites in the run-up to the wedding, and finds them a useful resource for keeping in touch with what’s going on and making arrangements for the day. I’m sure we’re not the first people to have a wedding web site but I’d like to think that ours is breaking new ground in some way… even if it’s just in terms of taste in colour schemes :)

Ok, partly for your information and partly to test my stylesheet, here’s a quick list of things that have already been sorted out, which I may or may not elaborate on in future:

• Venue for ceremony and reception booked
• Photographer booked
• Wedding dress ordered (!!!)
• Authorities to marry received from our local council
• Registrar provisionally booked to perform ceremony
• Wedding party finalised
• Wedding rings roughly designed

There may be more, in which case I’ll update this list or post again. Leave a comment if you’d like to know more about anything in particular, else I’ll write about whatever takes my fancy :)

Dlog… blog… wedlog… weblog… wedlock - get it yet?

Right, I’m Edith, the bride of this upcoming wedding, and this dlog you’re reading is for me, Paul and the rest of the wedding party (if they so wish) to post periodic updates describing their preparations for the wedding.

I think this has the potential to either be lots of fun or incredibly boring :)