That 7 Year Itch

Well, that was interesting.

Today has proven to be one of those days that are exceptionally packed. I woke up this morning, hit the ground running, and am just now starting to slow down. I'm bushed. It may not sound like much on the surface, but today I cleaned Fairy Girl's bunny hutch, vacuumed the house, scrubbed the bathtub in the master bath, re-tagged all the grafted bear branches because the labels I'd attached last week were starting to come off (and amazingly enough, all the grafted scions still appear to be alive), sold Girl Scout cookies with Monkey Girl for two hours in front of Wal Mart, and re-designed The Wife's blog. That last one came about because of a wholesale, professional redesign of her website for Lisa On Location which is approaching completion. The blog wasn't hosted on-site, so it wasn't included in the contract, hence, it fell unto me. One might think this is no big deal, but keep in mind my knowledge of HTML and web savvy is state of the art circa 1998. All the clever, later additions to the web, such as CSS and XML are utterly beyond me. So it was indeed a chore to muddle through, but I managed and The Wife seems reasonably satisfied with the results.

That accomplished, I finally bit the bullet and tackled my blog. I launched Gibberish in March of 2004, which means we're fast approaching the 7 year anniversary. Unlike many folks, I haven't changed the format or design a single time over that span, except to add folks to my blog roll on occasion. I'd become relatively comfortable in customizing the template used for The Wife's blog, so I decided to adapt it to my own uses. Since I'm all about the Chicken Ranch with my website, Chicken Ranch Central, it only made sense to carry those design elements over to the blog. The first thing I discovered in the redesign, oddly enough, is that somehow, somewhere, my Title and Labels had been set to automatically transliterate into Hindi. No joke. For the past two years I'd had to jump through hoops to post coherent titles to blog posts, because if I'd type them normally, they'd switch into a random assortment of squiggles. Not anymore. A small thing, maybe, but my life just got easier.

Unfortunately, since my blog is indeed 7 years old and had never been updated, quite a few Blogger improvements have passed me by in the interim. In fact, the structural underpinnings of my blog were woefully obsolete. When I made the conversion to the modern template, quite a few custom design tweaks I'd implemented were lost. Wacky stuff, like my blog roll. Ouch. Blogger claims to have saved my old template, but I can't find it anywhere, so I've been reduced to using the Wayback Internet Archive to reconstruct my blog roll. Except the most recent of my blogs it has saved dates to 2007, which is not entirely a completed list. So if you notice your blog was once part of my blog roll and is no longer, don't take it personally. My list of publications vanished as well, but I'll stress over that at some later date.

The long and short of it is, change can be good. I've got spiffy "Share This" buttons now so you good readers can re-post my clever wit to Facebook and the like, and I'll shortly begin importing my Twitter feed as well. I'm picking up steam on the Chicken Ranch book, even if agents are still lining up in droves not to rep me, and I'm confident we'll have a publisher and a publication date before the end of 2011. Good stuff's happening folks, and this spiffy new blog design is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Now Playing: The Kinks To The Bone
Chicken Ranch Central