We got Upgraded (and sneak peak at a new pattern)

A round of changes were made to this little corner of the web over the weekend. I’m feeling mighty smug about that. It only took me three pots of coffee, a few hours of cussing, and eighteen books from the Austin Public Library on web design.

Giving Myself a Pat on the Back

You didn’t notice anything different you say? Good. I hate going to a familiar web site and finding it to be not so familiar anymore. Its such a pain in the butt to have to hunt and peck around for stuff because some wretched person who knows more about web design than I do (i.e. anyone) moved it. So if the upgrades slipped right under your radar, I’m giving myself a pat on the back AND a gold star. Jess and I tried to keep stuff looking the pretty much the same.

That being said let me point out a few changes (lol):

• We’ve moved from our temporary home at rovingcrafters.wordpress.com to our permanent we-are-never-leaving-here-hallelujah home at rovingcrafters.com. WordPress does a bang-up job forwarding from the old domain to the new one so any links to pages at the old site should be just fine. But if you’ve bookmarked us, you might want to update.

 

• It should be easier to leave a comment on a post. Actually that change has been in place for about a month or so. But if you tried once to leave us some feedback and WordPress asked you to sign up for an account, just know that we’ve made it easier since then. Now it should only ask for a name and an email. Um…. it doesn’t have to be a real name or a real email. None of that info is tracked or kept or verified. I think you can make up a new name/email every time you want to comment. You can pretend to be eight different people and start a flame war with yourself on the Roving Crafters! But please don’t.

 

• We have two ways to look for stuff in older posts now. Jess gave us a search engine thingy. Its the magnifying glass in the upper right on the navigation bar. I have no idea how she did that. There is also a cloud tag over in the sidebar on the right. You might have to scroll down a bit to see it.

 

• Finally we made a few cosmetic changes that I hope aren’t too obvious but improve the readability of the site.

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 Something New

Other than having arguments with a stupid web page upgrading the site, I’ve been working on my next original design. Here is a sneak peak:

I’ll publish it over on ravelry instead of here because I’ll be charging for this one. My first for-money pattern! I’m excited and I hope it does well but my expectations are small. If it sells enough copies to pay off the upgrades we’ve made to this site I’ll be thrilled. If there is any money left over, Jess and I are going out for pizza and beer.

(Ya’ll aren’t going to have to pay for the pattern btw. I love you too much for that. Once its up on ravelry, I’ll publish a coupon code here that should be good for a free download.)