New Look

Not only has my lovely friend Caitlin given me my first blog award (future post pending), but she wanted to know what I've been doing to my blog. She loves the new and unfinished look, I personally think it still looks very similar to poo-on-a-stick, but what can you do?

My secrets?

1. Cut the crap. I love widgets--like, mega love them. It's a comfort to me to be able to look at, say, a countdown for how long I've been with the Big S.  It's constant, and flashy, and I love it. But, they look so messy and jumbled. Really, they're kind of like wearing too much jewelry. In one word: distracting.

2. I really wanted a single column template since I like to use a lot of pictures. In comes this blog template. My advice: don't use this template to start from scratch.  It has a lot of broken code and the divs are all over the place.  I had to have the honey use his computer science degree to whip it into shape just to get the header and pages to center and we had to widen the content area. What a mess.

3.  Don't have a computer hacker running around your house?  No problem. Get Firebug. This is a genius little bit of software that allows you to look at any webpage, hover over a page element, and look at the code behind it.  So, essentially, you could use it to copy and paste all my html and stylesheeting. Not that I would take kindly to that...mind you.  It's a great little tool to tweak your blog, get the code how you want it, and then copy it into the html editor of your blog.  Firebug won't actually change the real code for you, so it's OK if you make a mistake.  If you see something on a website you like and want to know how they did it, you can look at their code and then make it yours.  Really, it's fabulous.

4. The folks over at Maternal Lens got me on to digital scrapbooking. Until this week I never knew that existed  I got my background paper from Sassy Designs. Epic website full of things I must have!  They have sales a lot (not that they are expensive to begin with) and Maternal Lens gives away stuff from them pretty frequently. 

Lots of stuff going into this change.  I've got plans to work on my header this weekend (weather permitting).  I'm sure with our schedules it will take at least a week to get it edited and up and running.

Have mercy,