Posted on 3 Comments

Hopelessly boring

I feel hopelessly boring when I greet you with this kind of post, but until I get my act together enough to clean up my workspace, there’s no chance of anything crafty happening.  I promise it will be soon.  The itch to Make Stuff is getting stronger and stronger.  I’ve been satisfying that urge somewhat with breadmaking binges (there’s a delicious Maple Buttermilk Bread baking right now, and I just got my first whiff of it as I type) but, darn it, I really really want to get behind the sewing machine right now and crank out a few pairs of bedsheet lounge pants for summer.

Until that happens, I guess you’re stuck with this kind of post.  This “let me tell you what a nerd I’ve been for the last few days” kind of post.

I’ll avoid too many details, because I know this kind of thing can only hold so much interest.  Just let me point out the highlights:

  • There are some purely aesthetic layout changes, essentially taking the three separate white blocks (two sidebars and content) and making them into one large white block.   I also removed all of the images from the green portion at the bottom of the page and just put a simple copyright text.  Essentially, I was trying to simplify the look a bit.  I was feeling it was too busy.
  • I moved my list of favorite blogs off of the sidebars and onto their own page.  As much as I liked having them right out in the open, they dramatically cut into page load time.
  • Comments.  I spent a few days on this one.  What you’ll notice, maybe, is that the formatting is a little different.  I did that to make them blend in better with the aesthetics of rest of the site.  That was relatively easy in comparison to what I did behind the scenes.  Essentially, the old comments included a collection of hacks I had put in so that I could have threaded comments, gravatars, and email notifications.  With the most recent few versions, WordPress has added support for threading and gravatars, so I ripped out my old comment mess and replaced it with a much simpler version that takes advantage of the native WordPress functionality, and added a simple plugin to handle the email notifications. Let’s hope it all works.

Hey, if you’re still reading (and I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you dozed off back there) and you still don’t have a little picture of your own next to your comments, I encourage you to get yourself a gravatar.  It’s very cool, in that it works on this site, on any wordpress.com blog, on any self-hosted WordPress blog that has enabled them, and a variety of other sites around the web.  It’s free, and pretty easy.  Feel free to comment here and test it out, once you get one.

Now, no more nerdiness for me!  The kids and I have a little adventure planned for today, and I’m turning off the computer for a while.  Have a great day!

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Posted on 3 Comments

3 thoughts on “Hopelessly boring

  1. Looks nice and simple Lisa! Much cleaner look. It is amazing how much time the behind the scenes stuff takes to do. My hubby does the computer stuff. I unfortunately haven’t got enough of the nerd genes, so he handles that. (Although by the way I dress sometimes, one would wonder!)

    (While you’re working on blog stuff, I’m not sure if this is happening with everyone, but the commentluv thingy doesn’t seem to work when I post anymore. Maybe there is something wrong with that app?)

    1. Hmmm. I’ll see if it works for me. In the meantime, I see another problem, in that it won’t let me reply directly to your comment. Worked on my test blog…
      .-= See Lisa’s latest blog post: Hopelessly boring =-.

    2. Ok, I lied. It did let me reply to your comment – it just didn’t look like it was going to. Commentluv worked, too. Not sure why it didn’t do it for you!

      Thanks for the feedback, btw!

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