The New and Improved Website/Blog is Here!

Here it is, midnight, Monday morning and I have just finished up getting the new site to where I want it to be.  There's still a lot to do, but I'm really happy with what I was able to accomplish in the past week or so.  I'm now using Movable Type to control my whole framework for my website.  While some of my pages still have the look and feel of one or more of my previous generations of blog/website design, little by little, things are going to all migrate into this one.  How fast it goes is going to be dependent on how much html re-coding I can stomach at any given time. 

What things might you care about?

• All navigation can now be accomplished using the top bar.  It has links to all the major parts of my site.  All my contact information is now on the Contact page instead of in the sidebar, and links to all my patterns are now on the Patterns page instead of in the sidebar. 
  
• The "Recent Comments" widget in my side bar is fun and a nice way to keep track of the dialog in my recent posts. 
  
• All my entries have been republished and my category archives and tag cloud should be up-to-date. 
  
• I think overall the site and my blog pages are cleaner and easier to navigate. 
  
• I hope it will be easier to publish comments now.  My comment templates are pretty much the default MT4 templates, so they (in theory) should be optimized to perform well.  Please consider giving me a holler if you run into persistent problems with trying to submit a comment.  My blog has gotten rather large (1367 posts and more than 24,000 comments) so I think sometimes that my web host chokes on processing and re-creating all the pages it needs to whenever you leave a comment.  Added after testing... seems like for some reason when you use the "Preview" option for your comment and then submit, it gives you an error about not accepting the comment because of too many submissions in too short a time.  For some reason (and it happens for my blog posts, too, when I preview them before posting) when you do a "Preview" it seems to posting the comment and when you hit submit, it thinks you're posting the same comment a second time.  So if you get that message after a preview, don't worry, your comment most likely got through.
  

As I was working on updating my site, I got kind of nostalgic looking back over all the posts I've made, all the different styles my site has had.  And I was extremely appreciative of how clean and flexible Becky made my site styles when she gave it the spectacular facelift that produced all main images color themes.  I still think of it as my "new look" even though I can't exactly remember how long ago she created it for me.  I still love it and only tried to update/change it to be compatible with some of the new goodies made available by MT4.  Any oddities you see now are all my responsibility.  But I hope they are few and far between.

My next project will be to bring my technique section back on line -- I'm still pleasantly surprised by the fact that my little tutorials are useful to folks.  After that, I'll work on getting my project gallery back in to shape.  I've been using Ravelry for that for awhile, but I think I'd like to get things back here, in house, where I have more control over how they look.  I'd also like to create a book and tools review section for the site -- I have so much fiber arts stuff now, I'd like to share what I've learned about it with my readers.

But, most importantly, my next posts are going to be back to focusing on the crafty good stuff.  While I love all manner of coding, I've really been missing having some needles in my hand!