I haven’t posted in quite some time because I suppose I just needed a different type of challenge. You see, I’ve been relearning HTML and CSS so that I could update this site. Voila!

If you are reading this in your reader rather than on the web, I invite you to come take a gander!

Besides the look, you might appreciate these first two major updates:

It’s flexible!

The last time I did this (circa 2014), mobile viewing wasn’t as popular as it is now and I sorely needed to address that. HTML 5 is standard now and CSS also has new-to-me feature sets that weren’t available at the time, so it was fun to catch up. So, ta-da! This site is now happily phone and tablet friendly.

Let us recall what it use to look like in its most recent version:

Now with newsletter subscriptions!

A newsletter subscription has been requested on multiple occasions so with the new design, I made that available as well. “Ask and ye shall receive,” eh? While I get most of my updates through an RSS reader, I understand that isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. You can now sign up to a newsletter over on the Connect page. This simply means that you will get notification of blog updates in your inbox. Simple as that.

Other better things:

On the old site, I felt it wasn’t easy for newcomers to scan through my site and see if they like it. I noticed this personally when I myself ventured out into the wild. Thankfully, blogging is seeing a comeback! There were site designs that easily let me see if I wanted to follow the author, and other designs that just took too long to really get a feel for their content. Depending on how much time I had, maybe I never gave those sites a chance. I hope that the summary versions of the homepage, the gallery, and the search results help speed things along for anyone out there looking for similar content.

The old comments were convoluted a little. That’s solved with this much cleaner design. Most people contact me directly through the contact form, but maybe now some will find comments easier. Either way, I enjoy the conversations, so keep ’em up!

The Search functionality was never that great. That’s fixed! The excerpts let you quickly scan through the results, and with the thumbnail photo view, it is so much easier to make sure you are clicking on the post you want. Of course, all the posts from before today will need to be manually edited to add a feature image and proper text excerpt (and that’s on my docket), but at least newer posts going forward should always snazzy.

Over in the Gallery, the page now lets you click on an image to see it larger and there is a link that takes you to the main post so you can see all the photos and whatever I had to say about it (links to patterns and so forth). Again, this is true for new posts; I have quite a backlog of older ones that need to be manually entered.

The other links on the Gallery page are really only there for me (and my need of cataloguing for whatever reason), but now you can jump around the pages of books or games really quickly, as the subheadings are links to different areas.

Stay a while and check out all the new or better things!

See something? Say something!

I am positive there are still some quirks out there, but stop by and poke around! If you find something, please don’t assume I know about it; I only know what works on my phone and my computers with my browsers and my operating systems. So, you see, I need ya’ll to try to break it (:

Share your findings (and test these options for me, will ya?) via a comment or the contact form!

A big thanks goes to…

Boy, obviously, for putting up with my zillion questions and finding time to help. All the people on the web offering their knowledge of photoshop, HTML, and CSS for free. And especially both the w3schools website (it’s brilliant try-it-yourself design!) and O’Reilly’s HTML & CSS book.

Many posts forthcoming!

All that said, I haven’t only been working in the digital realm. I do actually have plenty of things to share so check back soon or sign up now to get notified of new posts!