My dear friend Philip (see link in the sidebar to his blog) has been struggling with "Moving House", spending countless hours debating over which web host to use. I've had re-design rolling around in my head. And I must say, it's been tumbling round the empty brain space quite a lot! My pages made me happy when I first started, yes. This experience has been one of extreme personal satisfaction. (Since the world revolves around me that's a really good thing!)  But more recently,

Follow up:

I've not been satisfied. I'm planning a re-do of most, if not all, of my pages to make them more to my liking. I don't want to clutter with useless ads, but some may be helpful to those who never venture to my online shopping page. I'm not a big advocate of paying for things online (free is almost always better in my book) but there are some times it's worth it (could be software or a particular product) and those are the ones I'll share.  I'm also going to separate useful free links/information from affiliate advertising so it's clear which is which. I despise sites where you can't tell when you're clicking on a paid ad and when you're not.

Speaking of online shopping...I went a little crazy. (Admittedly, I had visions of dollar signs in my eyes but reality is harsh...and if you want to talk about cluttered? Take a look at that page!) I've decided to reduce ads, paring them down to those really best suited to my site. I'm not driven by the need to advertise. If I make a little money, great! If not, well, so be it. Eventually, I'd I'll remove the online shopping page entirely. Interestingly, though I've a link to shopping on my main page, people don't seem to see it. Um...that's just bad layout from my point of view.

I've also pondered (sometimes more deeply than others) the idea of moving my articles into my blog posts. I've made the decision to do that. It's not going to be a mass move of billions of them (well...I don't have billions of articles...not even hundreds...just a handful) but I've wanted to edit and make some of them better anyway, so now is as good a time as any. It not only gives a second place to search for something you may remember having seen, but makes the job of posting the articles a little easier.  Worrying about HTML and layout in the midst of writing really isn't conducive to a good article writing. Blog posts are pretty self sufficient in that respect. I'll add a section to the pertinent pages with links to the various article posts (instead of a Past Articles page) for quick reference, but the custom Google search or a search in my blog should eventually yield the same results.

This will not be a blog driven layout. I don't like those either. (Hmm....seems a lot of things I don't like....perhaps another disorder there...) I'm enjoying the HTML and CSS part of having a site, but looking for a better way to manage some of the content once it's not shown on the original page. The database structure of a blog makes the task a bit easier for me. (Since I seem to be so busy creating other kinds of work for myself). Over the next few months, watch for changes and moving of information. (Um, yes - I guess I should warn you now - for those of you who faithfully check my blog RSS (and I'm pretty sure there are at least 2 if not 3 of you) you may have to endure the painful re-posting of articles you've already read. Hopefully they'll be better the second time around, and if I'm doing a reasonably good job with my humor, you won't mind reading (or at least skimming) them again.

I'm not going to become obsessed with doing this all at once (Ha ha! Right!) or I'll drive myself crazy (I won't debate the fact I already am crazy). Too many things on the plate and none get done. When I'm in the frame of mind to create something I won't feel the need to revise again and again, I'll do it. (Go ahead and laugh, but for all the time I spent on external CSS - I've decided to move it back to the pages themselves. My pages are so different from one another I'm finding the external of limited value to me.) Hopefully when this exercise is complete I'll be a little happier (...or as happy as a woman can be with anything that has the potential to be changed again when she changes her mind...) or at least things will be a bit better organized and perhaps I'll have learned a little more in the process.