New Look

As Marilyn noted, I switched over to the new Blogger Beta, and since many of my pictures and links were stored directly on blogger (I had a premium account for a while that let me FTP files directly to my blogger directory), I realized I had to recreate my template.

New Era, New Template
Since all my blog link buttons disappeared, and the picture of me at the top of the page was also gone, I figured it was the perfect time to clean up the look of my site.

Converting over to the beta was a painfully long process, but I didn't have to do anything while my four-year old blog took almost that long to convert over, despite the fact that the blog was unavailable for an hour or so.

Switching over to a new template wasn't awful, but I'm glad I don't have to do it regularly. One nice part is that I had access to my old template HTML, so it was easier to recreate things like my blog links and such. Google Blogger makes it easy to pick a template that's close to what you want, and then modify it. It's a much more user-friendly process than what it used to be, but that may also mean there will be a lot more inane blogs out there, because it now takes much less technical ability.

Some things about the switchover that I wasn't overly pleased with, was that I had to recreate my hits counter (very important for a "hits whore" like me) and I also had to re-set up my picture. I also don't like how the new Google Blogger requires you to manage comments through their site as opposed to through Haloscan, like I used to.

Overall, I much prefer the look of the new site.

Losing Myself
The one activity that allowed me to forget my woes for a while was reading. I spent some of the weekend finishing my latest book



The Lighthouse by P.D. James was another mystery book in her line of Inspector Dalgleish stories. I'm not a big fan of mysteries, but this book had a wonderful location where it all took place, the character definition was excellent and interesting, and the plot was enjoyable, and provided a great escape for hours at a time.

Current Knitting
I finished strip number four and five and just barely started on number six. I'll post pictures in the next blog entry.