Technology: Grrrrrr!

I'd like to say technology and I get along, but I'd be lying.

Behind the scenes, I'm the member of team "some things looming" that puts together the blog and changes the content on the website. It's almost laughable, as I'm also the member of the team with probably the least amount of computer savvy. So, I'll apologize now to you Internet Explorer users for the blog header sticking several pixels out of alignment. I'm a little bit OCD, so I can truly appreciate how bothersome that is. I found it's not a problem in either Firefox, nor Chrome. And when I tried to 'fix' it for IE, it was still off-centered, no matter what I did to the template. Not only that, it totally messed up the alignment in Firefox and Chrome! It's a CSS error, I'm told, by my programmer husband.

"CSS?" I asked.
"Cascading Style Sheets," he said.
"Cascading what whats?"
He blew out his breath. "Cascading. Style. Sheets," He said, patiently. "It's what they use to generate their templates."
"So, uh, how do I fix it?"
"I'll have to look at it later. I'm sure I can find some IE specific code to plop in there that will solve the situation." he said.

I'm not sure when 'later' is, as I've discovered through the years 'later' could mean today, or next millennium. But bless the man, he does eventually get around to it. I'm sure there's a quota for how much computer-help a wife can ask of a husband, and since putting up the 'stl' blog and website, I'm sure I've gone over my allowance ten-fold. Not only is he still patient with all my questions, but he's still in love with me. Go figure. So I'll beg a little patience from you loyal IE users while "we" (hahaha) try and figure out what's going on in the code.

~Melanie

The Blog has a new look!

Why did we change up the blog? Well, simply for this reason: Blogger updated its templates, and the 'some things looming' blog was no longer easy to edit. I started out by making a new header to replace the ol' boring one we had had before. Having learned a new graphics skill, I needed a place to use my new-found knowledge, and of course, the blog needed a face lift. It's a challenge to create something that maintains the look and feel of the original website. For one, our website is done in a totally different template/content management system than blogger. For two, because I'm not a programmer, I'm forced to use blogger's templates. Thank goodness for them, because otherwise our blog would still look like it was created in 1995.

So as these things usually do, one thing lead to another, and I had a new header, but no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to line up correctly with the rest of the boxes on the blog. I'm not a graphic designer, but I am a little OCD, and a few pixels to the left or right bothers me to no end. There was no help for it. I had to play with the new template designer.

I selected the first template I liked. The color gradated nicely down the sides going from dark at the top, to light at the bottom, the center space was wide and open, my new blog banner lined up beautifully. I was sold. Ever excited about my progress, I emailed it out and received this feedback: "I don't like the purple. It's girly." Hmm. Well, now. That's a problem there, because see, it's the same exact purple as on the side bars of our website. I just punched in the exact hex code of that purple into the template generator, and it changed the original template colors to the business standard. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

Tossing that template out, I found another one, and another and another. Each time I plugged in the purple, I was not as happy with the effect, until I came up with the current template. The pattern, at least, tones down the purple. And hopefully no one will get sea-sick. Besides, we're all about textiles, right? And that's uh, a pattern, and textiles have patterns, and uh, so the pattern is a good think after all.

So, if you check in here often, you might have seen the template changing from time to time as we were settling on a look and feel we both can agree on. I'll add an apology for the lack of posting. There's been a lot to do for our up and coming show, 'simply irRESISTible' and the blog took a backseat in priority. That will be changing in the near future. So stay tuned as we feature artists in the show, talk about what activities we'll be hosting, and the usual general behind-the-scenes fodder we normally post.

~melanie