There isn't a whole lot of craftiness going on right now, so I'm going to use the rest of this week to give thanks.

My first round of thanks is going to everyone who clicked over to my blog blog to help out.  I was nervous about the switch over, and it was so great to get feedback and support from all of you!  Thank you so much!

Bloglines was a dream when I switched over the blog blog.  It picked up the feeds without a hitch.  But, for some unknown reason, Bloglines has only updated one of the four feeds it sees for my craft blog.

I apologize for another picture-less post, but ...

The new blog application is up and running! ! ! ! !

This is a surreal and sublime moment for me.  I just switched my blog blog over to my new blog application today.  I've been working hard for months, and it's exciting that everything is finally coming together.

I got my invite to Ravelry today!  I've been holding my breath since I put myself on the waiting list.  I figured I waited too long to sign up and the user name "futuregirl" would be taken*.  Lucky me!!  It was still available!  I only had a second to look around, but it looks like a great site.

Yesterday I got this ornament from Jessica at Funky Finds.  How adorable is her little dog?!

I'm still moving forward with the idea of building my own blog application, which is a good sign since I've usually given up on the whole idea by this point.  Andrew and I have been discussing ways for me move foward with a completely different system while still having all the old pages (or at least *appear* to have all the old pages).  There are still some details to work out and concepts to be tested, but I think the whole thing might be a lot easier than I imagined.  Either that or I'm deluded.  Time will tell.

* on Flickr and Etsy I use futuregirl_dot_com/futuregirldotcom ... because no one ever has that. Wonder why? ;)

Good news first

Velorian received the mystery box and took some awesome pix of what I tucked inside.  Yay!

OK, now on with the bad ...

I'm not getting all my Blogger comment alert emails

I just found out that I haven't been getting about half of the comment alert emails from Blogger since the "Pet My Scarf" post.  That makes me feel sick.  First of all, a snarky comment about Lenore snuck past me and one of her Grandchildren saw it, which is horrible.  Actually, that's how I realized something was up, because she left a response for that troll.

Blogger only emailed me 26 of the 52 comments for Lenore's post!

I quickly checked the subsequent posts and realized it's been a problem for a while.  I feel *terrible* because some of you have said wonderful things that I would have responded to WAY before now, some of you asked questions that need to be answered, and who knows how many comments were left on random, old posts that I will never ever know about. :(

Anyone else having this problem with Blogger comment alert emails? I know it's not a problem with my actual email.  I'm getting all my paypal emails because I always double-check my paypal account when I get a pattern order.  **edit: I'm not the only one **

Blowing through my bandwidth

I *way* underestimated how much traffic Boing Boing was going to send my way.  They took my site visits from around 1,100 per day to 6,713 on the 5th.  Six times the traffic!  That was totally overwhelming.

I was COMPLETELY unprepared for what happened the next day:  Fark.com picked up the story about Lenore's ornaments (focusing on the octopus-ness, not the heart-warming-ness, sadly). They sent 21,446 visitors to my site.  Jaw dropping, isn't it?

I've now used 40% of my 80 Gig monthly bandwidth allotment.  Last month I almost went over, so I'm pretty sure this month I will, unless I move my site.  It's too bad, too, because I love my host.  But they charge $5 for 5 Gig increments if you go over and they don't offer a hosting plan with more than 80 Gigs of bandwidth (which I think is strange).

Bookmarking widget

This morning I added the Add This widget to all my posts.  If you click it, you are taken to a page where you can add the post to any one of the bazillion bookmark aggregate sites out there.  I've received a lot of traffic from people "stumbling" my site, so I thought I'd make it easier.

Add This was super simple to put into my Blogger template, so if you've been thinking of adding something like this to your blog, try them.  If you're using a new Blogger Template, they have a fancier button that expands a little panel where the user can select their bookmarking service without leaving your site.  It's not just for Blogger though - you can see it in action at the Village Voice website.

I'm fairly new to all-things-blogging. I'm usually a late-adopter. I like to wait until things shake out and I can make an informed decision. I'm not a gadget junkie. I do not like to do things until I know *exactly* what I want to do ("I want to take a look at all the spatulas again, before I make my decision ... "). But I wanted a blog fast and blogger looked good and I figured all blog software was pretty much the same at this point.

Wrong.

Whip Up and Craftlog have cracked open the crafting weblog universe to me. As I surf, I see things I want on my blog. Like categories. Like automatic next AND previous links (not just previous). I've spent hours and hours this week reading reviews, studying charts, learning new terms, reading feature lists, and trying to install Blogger hacks that don't don't don't work.

And then I come across Extreme Craft. He's using blogger without fancy hacks (as far as I know). I had a great time skipping around in his archive. It was kinda fun not knowing what I might find.

On the other hand, I only learned about Gocco because Craftlog has it as a category link.

Ugh.

My anxiety stems from many things.

  
1. I've spent a ton of time spent researching blogs and I still feel like I don't know enough to make a good decision. I could have been creating wonderful things and blogging about them instead!
  
2. I learn better when I discuss things with people or have a person explain things to me. I like to ask questions. Reading documentation doesn't sink in as easily because I stop in the middle of every other sentence to google the definition of a word. By the time I figure out what a trackback ping is and I've forgotten why I was looking it up.
  
3. This is the embarrassing one: I'm a web programmer. I should totally have this nailed. I should have written myself a blog on my lunch break today.

I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to feel comfortable choosing a different blogging tool (or building my own) until I know a lot more about what is out there. I want to test out some of the other tools. I want to see a lot more blogs. And if I'm going to do all that and still craft and still blog, it's going to be a while.

In the meantime, Blogger is free and easy.  But, oh, how I wish I had categories!