When we see friends or coworkers and they say "what have you been up to lately?," our response is almost always the same. "We've been busy...working on the house, working on our blog, working long hours for our day jobs." To me, it's funny how this "our blog" piece was added a little over a year ago. In the time since we started writing about our various projects and our Old Town life, we've probably put in as much time working on blogging and supporting the blog as we have on our home. And like our home, we're always trying to upgrade our blog to make it just a little bit better.
I couldn't resist using the good old "Website Under Construction" sign. If you've been trolling the Internet for as long as I have, this little sign should give you a bit of nostalgia for the mid to late 1990s.
Lately, in addition to all of our hard work we've been doing on our various house tasks, we've been working on a few upgrades and some reorganization within our blog too, and it just wouldn't be fair to our blog not to mention it (our house can't get all of the glory). Just in case you hadn't noticed, over the weekend we put up a new link in the top navigation bar that links to our new "Renovation" page.
The Renovation page will serve to provide quick links to the various post categories that have to do with the major projects organized by room/area that we've written about thus far. In each case we've provided a before, during, and after photo of the project, and a link that will take you to a listing of the various posts for that project.
Lately, we've just felt like we're getting so many posts (368 so far) that it may not be overly obvious what's what and where to start, especially for newer visitors. We're hoping this new page with rooms and major project links will help everyone find the information they're looking for if curious about the tile we used in the vestibule, how we quickly made over our guest bedroom, or what we did when we found termites had eaten nearly the entire back wall of the kitchen (hint: if you don't know, it wasn't pretty).
As we write about projects we've already completed, and as we complete additional projects, we'll be sure to add them to the Renovation page. We're just very hopeful that the newly completed projects will come much sooner than later.
In other news about the blog, I'm 100% certain (ok, maybe 99.9%) we've resolved the duplicate post issue in the Google Reader RSS feed, so if you unsubscribed out of annoyance (I don't blame you, it was really annoying), you can subscribe again and will only get one post per day.
We've also been fighting with Facebook integration quite a bit of late. You know the little Facebook Log In button? Yeah, the little blue one you see on this site near the comments, and on many other sites too? Well, Facebook has been having some reliability issues with that button and how it acts. We've been working hard and trying to update how it works, but if you're having trouble commenting on any of our posts, it's pretty likely that little blue button is to blame. If anyone knows Zuck, can you have him work on the reliability of his SSL connections? That would help a lot. Thanks.
We actually love the virtual high fives that are our blog comments, and the last thing we want to do is prevent you from leaving one, so our apologies if this has impacted you. After much thought and hard work, I think it's more or less resolved now, but please let us know if you have any continuing errors or issues.
And the final item we just recently resolved, drumroll...I think our website finally looks the way it is supposed to in Internet Explorer! Yay! Being a Chrome, Firefox, Safari user, I had no idea just how bad our website was looking in Internet Explorer. The navigation was messed up, things were pushed to the side and out of whack, so many issues. But I think everything is more or less resolved, and in my testing on IE8 and IE9, it seems to be looking the way I expect it to. So if there are any IE users out there that are experiencing odd issues, please let us know. Like our house gremlins, these are our website gremlins, and we're trying to knock them out one at a time.
If you want to make your own IE voodoo doll, head over to the Chigarden Tutorial. I might need to make one of these for work. I've been fighting with IE there too.
Well, that about does it for blog news. We're still working on a nice house floor plan, and will hopefully have that in the coming weeks. Do you have any burning questions about our blog you'd like us to answer? Perhaps a feature request or change? Let us know, we're always trying to make this place more friendly for our readers.
