Yarnification

Hey, I know everything looks kinda funny right now. I’m trying out a new template and I am too lazy to set up a test blog.

I’ve been using this for a while now for patterns I get online that I don’t want to either print right away or save in Word format (inevitably, if I save a pattern in Word, I will mess it up when I go to reopen it later and then spend ten minutes trying to get the formatting back the way it’s supposed to be). And I know I’ve seen a few people here and there wondering if there’s cheap PDF software for publishing patterns, too.

Anyway: PDFCreator. It’s free, and it works great. You can use it from any windows program—it gets installed as a printer driver, so you just go to print and pick the PDFCreator as your printer, and it’ll save whatever file you’ve got as a PDF file. It’s been working out really well for me. This is the first free one I’ve ever run across; everything else I’d seen that would do this was shareware and I am all about the free software, so I jumped on this when I saw the link in one of my newsletters…

I upgraded WordPress to the new version right before I left for the rest of the weekend on Saturday. I figured it’d come out okay because I’d run the exact same upgrade on a different site of mine a couple days ago and it worked out just fine, so I didn’t do all that much checking aside from making sure the page would load.

But that’d be too simple, and the feeds have been broken all weekend. I think it’s fixed now.

I finished the Seraphina shawl last night (Heh. Just in time for the weather to turn warm) but the photos I took didn’t come out, so I’ll try that again tonight. Or tomorrow—we need to pick Sara up at the airport in Columbus tonight and then drive her to Athens and I may not be up for much by the time we get back home. Soon, though.

The memo bag is mostly done, but I’m dithering about the flap. The chevron rows on the flap are coming out just slightly narrower than the rest of the bag. It’s slight enough that if I tug on it it’ll straighten out and be as wide as the rest, but I’m afraid it’ll shrink a lot when I felt the thing and look weird when it’s done. So I can’t decide if I want to rip out all those rows and re-do them with a bigger hook or what.

I bought yarn for that little corset over the weekend. I didn’t mean to, meant to wait a while, but we were at Hobby Lobby and Don is such an enabler and all that. (Yeah. We’ll blame it on Don. I had nothing to do with it.) Paton’s Katrina in black. I decided against holding out till I found that Berocco suede because I knew I wasn’t going to find it anyplace closer than Pittsburgh and I didn’t want to have to pay shipping on it. That Katrina also looks less horrendously warm, which is nice.

The pattern demands that you use yarn that would knit up at 19 sts/4 inches, and this is 18 sts/4 inches, but I am not worried about that. (Famous last words?) I always have trouble making gauge because my stitches come out too small and have to change hook sizes and so on, so if anything, having yarn that’s just a smidge bulkier should help.

Okay, broken photos, thumbnails and links to gallery pages should all be 100% fixed now. So far it even looks like Bloglines didn’t read any of the edited posts as new—interesting, since it kept doing that before when I was fixing links and things.

The shawl is pretty close to done. I’ve got the main triangle done, just need to do the edging and fringe. Though I’m going to see what it looks like pre-fringe before I decide on that because fringing makes me crazy. If I do fringe it, I’ll probably do the twisty fringe like on Marlo’s Aran scarf that I made last winter, much easier to deal with…

If you’re using Bloglines, I’ve got old posts bobbing to the surface again while I fix things that I broke last week. Please disregard…

I actually am working on a project or two, but everything’s going slowly enough for the time being that there’s not much to say about what I’ve gotten done.

Also, the gallery is working again, but the pictures in the posts probably aren’t because I haven’t gotten the redirects working (the new version uses a different URL format).

So on to the quiz results!

Just FYI, my gallery has been broken since yesterday. That’s because I started upgrading to the new Gallery 2, had a problem, got help at the Gallery forum (where there are very helpful people), ran out of time, and then forgot to undo the change I had to make to upgrade that also broke the gallery’s address.

The gallery being broken also has probably resulted in many/most of my project pics being broken, too, since I was uploading them to Gallery and then pulling them over here.

Right now I’ve got the new Gallery installed and I’m importing photos, so by the time you see this it might even be working! But if you try to visit it and see only a test album with a photo of a butter cow, it means I’m still working on things…

I just looked at the weather forecast at Bloglines (did you know you can get the forecast there? you just go here and type in your location or ZIP code) and every day for the next five days the high is supposed to be in the mid-seventies. I know that’s not really fall weather per se, but not a single 80° day really drives home the season change. Where did the summer go, anyway?

And how come I never find myself saying, “Hey, that winter just flew by! Can you believe it’s spring already?” Wouldn’t that be nice?

Hey, I remember reading someone’s blog months ago who was having a really hard time with Bloglines and was looking for something different. It was long enough ago that I can’t remember where I read it. And I found this recently and thought I’d share. It turns out that NewsGator has pretty much the same service. And you can export your subscription list at Bloglines, then import it at NewsGator, so you don’t have to add all your subscriptions all over again. (To do that you click “Edit” on your blog list, scroll waaaay down to the bottom, and pick “Export subscriptions”. A window will open that’s all full of gibberish code. Go to “File”, “Save as”, and make sure the file extension is .xml which is the format NewsGator can import.)

When I registered at NewsGator, it was a little strange at first because it makes it sound like it’s a pay service only—but it isn’t. There’s a free version that does everything Bloglines does as far as I’ve seen, and while you’re registering there’s a page that lets you pick which version you want, free or pay.

I set up an account with them and I’m using both them and Bloglines right now to decide which I like better. So far I’m liking NewsGator a lot and it seems to pick up new posts in my feeds quicker than Bloglines does. But some things about them are weird, like when you go to add a feed and it tells you you can search or browse, then after staring at the page a while you see this link above all that that says “URL & Import”, which is where you add feeds the way you would at Bloglines. Also I think you have to click something to mark a feed read, but that might just be something I set wrong in my preferences. (I just checked on that, and there was a box I could check on the settings page to mark them read automatically after I look at them like what happens at Bloglines.)

So we’ll see who I like better in the end, I guess. I suppose it’s mostly a matter of getting used to the changes in interface from Bloglines. I don’t have a really compelling reason to switch apart from Bloglines seeming to take a long time to register that a blog has new posts, but I figure it’s worth checking out and keeping my subscriptions listed there in case Bloglines has problems.

I’m doing a test here, going to check after I post this to try to see how long it take each of them to pick up the new post.

[Update: After posting this, I hit reload on my Bloglines and Newsgator pages about every fifteen minutes or so. Results:
Posted at: 3:30 (I know it says 3:10 or so but that's when I started writing it, not when I posted.
Bloglines: picked up the post sometime between 5:15 and 5:30 (so upwards of two hours)
Newsgator: picked up the post sometime between 4:00 and 4:15 (somewhere between a half hour and 45 minutes)
Very interesting...]

I haven’t crocheted in a few days. Aside from the Numb Finger (and I am taking B-vitamins more regularly now, including an extra B-6, thanks to Deneen’s tip that it doesn’t seem to be the one of the B vitamins that invites Captain Heartburn to the party), remember how I mentioned a few days or so ago that I had this twingy thing that I’ve come to associate with early signs of carpal tunnel? I had almost no sooner posted that than both my wrists went south on me. One of them I have a brace for from back when I had problems with it, and I’m wearing while I use the computer (which is difficult, but not impossible since it’s a straight brace, not the bent kind, which my doctor said was inflaming the tendons in my wrist), but the other one, my left wrist, and I’m left-handed, is feeling pretty bad.

So I guess I need to not stress my wrists out while I let the B vitamins do their magic trick. And that means all my thready projects definitely need to be put off for a while. After another day or two of no crochet, hopefully I’ll be feeling enough better to be able to tell whether crocheting with bigger hooks is aggravating the problem.

In any case, I’m hoping it gets better soon…

Just FYI if you access my feed at Bloglines or someplace like that…Since I’ve been updating posts here and there to fit them into my new category structure, a few of them are popping up at Bloglines as new posts. If I only change the categories it doesn’t happen, but sometimes I’ve been noticing a typo or a broken link and fixing it, which seems to make Bloglines think it’s a new post.

This will probably take me a few more days or a week since I’m just doing a month’s worth of posts here and there, so my feed might be a little wonky with old posts occasionally getting marked as new again for a little while.

Hey, I’m actually doing WIP on Wednesday! (Er. It is Wednesday, right?) The bad news is that it’s almost identical to last week’s, still limiting how much I crochet because of the finger thing.

1. Purse. I intend to bust out the sewing machine tonight. I’d like to get the purse handles finished and attached, dig around for that black fabric that I know I have somewhere, and get the lining made. I may not necessarily get around to attaching it tonight, though, since I also need to do laundry and things like that.
2. Comfort pack. I have the cover and buttons made and one button sewed on (two to go—only three total since it’s narrower than the last one I made). The fabric for the inner pack is cut, just need to sew it up and fill it while I’ve got the machine out for the purse lining.
3. Dreaming doily. I haven’t touched this all week since I started the pineapple doily. I’ll come back to it.
4. Ankle socks. Also untouched this week.
5. Pineapple doily. This is one of the patterns in the Workbasket I picked up, and it’s my first doily in #30 thread. Coming along very slowly but steadily since I’m only working on it a little at a time.

Boring stuff ahead: I’ve done a little bit of work on the blog here and there. I’ve been doing better at keeping my WIP progress bars updated after noticing earlier this week that the list had almost no bearing on what I’m acutally working on. And I moved the calendar and archives closer to the top of the page and installed a plugin to make the archives look more organized. Recently I’ve also been reworking the categories a bit, mostly just to make things better organized for me since the categories don’t really affect what you’re seeing on the page unless you click on a cagetory to see all the posts listed in it.

Okay, I’m done here for today, need to get things wrapped up at work…