Recently in Graphic Design Category
I've been inspired to do a little blogkeeping. I updated my masthead and added a font color; these will be changed from season to season (this idea came from Heather Armstrong/Dooce, whose mastheads and backgrounds change monthly). I've put together the Finished Knits gallery, stil needs a bit of work, but it's fine for now. Still to come are the Yummy Yarn Designs and Norwegian Knits-Along galleries, and I need to put Ravelry links as well. Long overdue, I know. I've also updated the sidebar and Patterns page to include the two latest: the Simple Yarn-Over Shawl and the Koigu Striped Socks.
Patterns. I've created a few patterns in the meantime. A striped hat for my niece (her 4th hat from me for her 4th birthday; I plan to make her one for every year of her life). A simple top-down hat with long earflaps. A colorwork hat. A lace scarf. A frivolous bit of a jacket, maybe it's really a shrug. The last pattern that needs publishing is the Arlecchino socks, which I just found the notes for! Yay. I love those socks, the seed stitch and purl and knit diamonds that so fit well with each other. I am loving the simple these days....
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Four years after it first launched, Yummy Yarn has a redesign. I'll keep it short: it fits a 1024 x 968 pixel browser, it's 3 columns, and it was created in Movable Type 4.1*. There's more white space, a revised logo, and things have been moved around or added, most notably a Patterns page and a new Contact address. I see pattern publishing in my future.
The biggest change is in my copyright, which now allows others to use my images with explicit permission, for which you'll have to email me.
I've been eager to get this redesign off my plate, because I've got lots of finished knits—and a pattern—to show. I'll call this version a work-in-progress, as I still have to refine a few things.
1: My masthead isn't finalized, and I want to be able to change it from month to month (or season to season, depending on my laziness).
2: Fine-tune the global nav items. DONE
3: Reorganize sidebar assets. SKIP
4: Reformat the galleries.
5: Captcha widget not working! Thanks, everyone, for alerting me to the comments flub. I seem to have dropped the widget somewhere in my code, so I just changed the comments setting for now. DONE
6: Permalink not working. DONE. Quick fix: make one-word titles moving forward.
And so on. But first, some sleep!
* If you're thinking of upgrading to MT 4.1, know that every major asset has been modularized and has its own template. It'll drive you nuts for a while, but persevere and you'll get it after a few days. I've waited for this move into modularization since I first started blogging, having done a bit of it on my original blog design. The application, however, starts to get messy when you get to the stylesheets and the sidebar, with so many variables when a handful would do. Six Apart's figured out that people want a friendly stylesheet, releasing a wysiwyg assistant whose code you can just paste into the front-end templates. But for those hobby coders (me!) who want a complete facelift, be prepared to spend hours and hours of time in the application!
This was taken outside the old city walls of Rothenburg, which we visited earlier this month. If there was one village that embodied traditional German architecture, it would be this. It's a tourist town, of course, with a store selling Christmas ornaments year-round that one of our friends likes to call a "chamber of horrors"! To each their own. :-)
Tonight we'll be with family around the fondue pot, then we'll take in a performance of the orchestra at one of the cathedrals. We'll be ushering in the New Year at the Nuremberg castle with sparklers and champagne, six to nine hours ahead of most of you in the U.S.
Happy New Year!
Blog blogworthy: I fixed the comments bug! Or more accurately, someone pointed me to the link regarding the bug in Movable Type's Knowledge Base. IF. You ever decide to upgrade to version 4, make sure your archives are set for Individual/Entry, otherwise you won't have them. Or, add some additional code to the permalink. Unfortunately the Comments form isn't working because my templates are all custom-coded, and not in sync with MT 4.x. (Nightmare. I'm so working on a redesign!)
