Sunday, February 27, 2011

'Cuz every girl's crazy...

...'bout a sharp dressed man
-ZZ Top, "Sharp Dressed Man"

So, my blog has gotten all dressed up - whatcha think?

On Friday night, my awesome bloggy buddy Joye came over to play. (And to eat Girl Scout Cookies, which we put a pretty nice hurtin' on.) I think her blog is just lovely, and she came over to help me prettify mine a bit. You'd think that by working on it until 1 a.m. we'd have been able to teach ourselves significant amounts of html AND become experts on PhotoShop. Right? Well, not really. I'm sure we could have done both of those if we hadn't been so busy catching up on each others' lives and chatting about everything from Jon Bon Jovi's backside to the bedside manner of cardiothoracic surgeons to potty training. We had an awesome time hanging out, and between our random topics of conversation, she taught me all kinds of cool web design things. I spent much of the day on Saturday trying to put my new tricks into practice.

Unfortunately, I now know just enough about PhotoShop to be really dangerous. I can destroy layers with the best of 'em. I can toss in some text and really junk up a picture. And I know just enough html to take a decent looking website and make it look like a hot mess. At one point, I had polka-ovals on one side (not polka-dots mind you ... stretched out ugly ovals!) and stripes on the other side of the blog. I had my text going way over the edges of both borders, and of course that RENT video in the last post is still about 2 sizes too big for the space. (I've only tried to fix that 17 times.) In the end, I decided to go with the snazzy new header at the top and stick to one of the templates that blogger is kind enough to give to me. My consolation is that I think most of you are reading this via some sort of reader and never actually see the layout anyway. Content is what counts, right? (I'll just keep telling myself that.)

But even if my blog looked exactly like it did on Friday morning, I had more fun than the law should allow. In the words of my dear friend Mindy, "Friendship is good for the soul." True dat! So, THANK YOU Joye for a fun night, for great advice (which I absorbed a tiny portion of), and for being a really wonderful friend.



PS - I did add this neat little signature ... it's not exactly the way I sign my initials, but it's close. And I likey, even if I did copy the idea!

7 comments:

Unknown said...

I appreciate all the work that you've done, but I need to be honest and say as long as there are pictures of your two little ones...this is a great looking blog....
And if I were writing as beautifully as you, I wouldn't worry about how any of it looked.
Thanks for sharing with all of us,

Dwight said...

ah yes, life outside the rss feed. I forget that people actually do things like give websites unique designs...

Very nice.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Cara. Nicely said, Cara. Jen, you are an inspiration!

Anne T.

P's mom said...

I like it!

Lisa said...

By your song choice, I totally thought this was going to be about the boys new duds! They will be sharply dressed, as well as the blog. It looks great and I love the signature.

Anonymous said...

Nice!

joye said...

I loved, loved, loved our girls night ... just what this Mama needed. You are quite the wonderful friend, yourself!