And For My Next Miracle… The Exploding Brain!

Oh, my brain is fried. Happily, it isn’t really required for the laundry folding that I have to do this evening. I’m still working a gazillion hours on web stuff, and I will be so happy when it’s pinned down and I can move on to something else.

Today my big project was revamping the Gymboree News Blog. I upgraded my blog software; switched out the template to a snazzy new one that I really like; got rid of the unnecessary stuff on the sidebar and added important things like email signup, Favorite Posts, and a Twitter feed box; hooked it up to my email service so the blog posts automatically go out to people on the list; hooked it up to Twitter so blog post titles will be tweeted for people there (increasing exposure and readership); added a little advertising here and there; added stats to everything so I can tell how many people are reading the emails, blog, and tweets; deleted some old pages that didn’t need to be there; updated the About the Author page; and generally cleaned up and revamped the entire thing. It took about seven hours. Then I fed Henry some oatmeal and took a power nap.

Even though I’ve been doing web stuff for six years now, I still always underestimate how long projects will take. All of those things on that list are easy enough to do, but getting them all done and figured out and cooperating with each other without breaking each other is a bit more complicated (upgrading is notorious for breaking stuff all by itself; happily it went smooth as could be this time). Plus, just keeping track of all the little pieces is a headache.

But it’s all done now, which is great because I’m picking up a new blog editor this week to run the GNGC blog (swapping for a link back to her site on each post) and now it’s all cleaned up, spanking new and ready to go. Yay!

Okay, I’m off. Must go make dinner and put Mr. Cranky Pants to nap before he hits my caps lock again.

Rachel