I spiffed up the front page a bit with photos, I'm still not sure if I'm happy with the news section. I also cleaned up the admin pages a bit but that would be hard to tell from just viewing the site. I also cleaned up a few formatting issues like the date and the notebook summary.

I also fixed a bug that had to do with marking notebooks closed and another one having to do with uploading photos. Also I had a scare with the database being lost, I think my provider must have been having some issues but either way I'm going to make another backup of my website and database after I finish this entry. Overall I think things are coming along nicely.

Are you impressed by how many sentences I managed to start with the word also?

Here are some photos of the gloves, I finally decided to do one less pattern rep and stick with the #3 needles, rather than using the #1's to get the gauge. I'm happy with how they are working out. I also decide to go back to dpns rather than using the magic loop method. The pattern repeats don't line up nicely in columns and it was a pain to be sliding one stick back and forth around the loop, its easier to just slip the stitch onto the next dpn.

Well I've been working on sorting out the navigation of my site but I keep getting distracted by pretty colors and 'web 2.0' themes and perhaps a bit of searching online for new knitting patterns. I did spend several hours on Thursday playing with a content management system (CMS) called Drupal but I felt like it was a bit bulky for what I wanted. I also felt like if I was going to learn a web technology I would rather learn basics in PHP and CSS than to spend my time trying to tweak a specific CMS.

I just noticed my enter key is not working in this text box, how odd.

Anyway, I think I'm making progress on the navigation front, I found a site describing something called suckerfish dropdowns which are kind of cool so I'm going to use them to store a more compact list of projects and blogs. That way I can devote the main page realistate to just the current open notebook.

All Good ideas: Multitasking, Snacking on a fresh, juicy grapefruit, Sipping tea whilst blogging

Not a good idea: Multitasking by heating up tea for hot water while eating the grapefruit thinking that tea will still be desirable with the grapefruit taste in one's mouth.

My site is based on the idea of having different notebooks (or dare I say scrapbooks) which hold information on a specific topic, just like a journal that you might scribble ideas in or a notebook that you might use to track progress on a project. Originally I was thinking of a design where the main blog was sort of a separate entity but the development was getting a bit out of control, and this is a much cleaner, more simplified organization. Instead I have a generic base container called a notebook and then individual notebook entries which can be blog posts or progress updates on a knitting project or some photos from a day of sightseeing while on a trip.

I have lots more to do but I've moved over my blog so I'm declaring my site officially started! I would love to hear any comments or suggestions you have or bugs that you've noticed.

The pattern for these 'wine and roses mitts' comes from my favorite knitting magazine Interweave Knits. I'm making these gloves out of Jo Sharp alpaca silk georgette.

The gauge of this pattern is 16 sts and 22 rnds = 2" in stockingnet and the wrapper of the yarn I'm using says 25 sts and 33 rows = 4" in stockingnet. The woman at the yarn store said that I could knit this yarn up at 32 stitches to 4 inches, which is true, but it is a pretty dense knit which probably would have been nice for gloves except that these are lacy gloves and they don't really drape nicely when then are knit that tightly so I've had to rip them out and start over a few times to get the size and texture I waned.

For the last few days I've noticed about mid afternoon that I've aquired a black smudge on my wrist above my thumb. I imagine that it looks like the sort of smudge you get if you are a chimney sweep but since my chimney sweep smudge experience consists entirely of watching "Marry Poppins" I could be wrong about their similarity. Anyway, I have no idea where it comes from, it's not as if I have a chimney that I may have been inadvertently sweeping when I wasn't paying attention. I'm actually in London at the moment but I've been madly working on my new website (a link to which I'll be publishing here soon) so my daily routine has been something like: get up, watch tv/work on website, eat bagel, work on website, and then mid afternoon I notice the black smudge. As you can see there is no activity that seems obvious for black smudge acquisition. I did do a bit of laundry one day but since my laundry is smudge free it seems unlikely to have come from that. Today I seem to be smudge free (thus far at least) and Kim made toast instead of me but he is smudge free so I don't see how the toaster could be the culprit. It's a mystery. But as long as the black smudges don't start covering increasingly large sections of my body or become immune to soap or cause me to have strange powers like the ability to levitate I suppose it isn't to big of a problem.