your eyes are not deceiving you. yes, gleek.net has gone black and white and every shade in between. to tell the truth, i was really sick of orange and that funky little font i was using for the logo and sidebar headers. i was also sick of verdana and geneva. verdana gets enough play on the web nowadays and my two favorite fonts, trebuchet and century gothic, seemed to get trampled on. no matter. i've taken it upon myself to do something about it.

here are the improvements i've made:

added a top navigation - i've moved about and contact to the top nav where they should have been all along. these are two important sections for people who just found my site and need the quick and dirty of it all. they should never be relegated to the sidebar. i've created a patterns section (actual content to come) and put the gallery up top too since that seems to be what gets the most traffic around here. the archives dropdown was also missed quite a bit hanging out on the side so i moved that up top too. by the way, you can always click on gleek.net to get back home.

shortened the sidebar - really, who needs all those links in the sidebar? the only important information are the recent posts, search, and what's going on on the reading site, no? all the rest is fluff. the important fluff, i determined, were the del.icio.us links and the webrings. everything else could go.

limited to 3 recent postings - traffic on my site spiked high in october! i couldn't believe it when i saw the chart but i got almost twice as many visitors as the previous month. thanks to all who have stopped by! i hope you'll come back. in order to keep the weight of the homepage down, i've limited the number of postings to three. all the other posts can be perused using the archives menu at the top or by the using one of the eight recent postings links in the sidebar.

i also upgraded moveabletype to version 3.2 which has great comment spam handling improvements. i no longer need mt-blacklist (though it has served me well over the years, thank you very much) but i'll leave the blacklist.txt at the root in case anyone wants to borrow it. it's huge but has worked so well over the past four or five months i've barely had to touch it.

the gallery and backpack pages have been updated too (man, was i busy this weekend!) i've uploaded pictures of projects in progress, yarn i've bought, and stuff i've been up to. posts on all those things to come. the backpack pages (see the sidebar) have been split into three to better manage the sheer amount of craftiness that goes on around here.

there's much more going on but i've reached the point where i don't want to look at my computer anymore this weekend. it's time to sit back and cast-on for mom's second sock. no second sock syndrome for me! mom expects these for christmas, don't ya, mom?

###