I'm still not finished with my homework from the fair, I have to cut down on the time I need for my NESAT presentation (aaaargh it is way, way too long still, there are about 7 minutes to cut from it), and there are still a few website issues to solve... though I hope I have most of them done now.

The shop should be running smoothly again now, and I have finally changed the slightly weird ordering for the linen bands (in units of 10 cm) to "normal" ordering per metre, with the possibility to enter decimal numbers, so you can now get, for instance, 1.6 metres. (As always, if you have feedback, or find something that does not work as expected, please do let me know. I'm really thankful for that - I try to test things, but it is so easy not to catch glitches, especially with all these different browsers and screen formats these days.)

I've also finally added an option on how customers would like to be addressed - formally or informally. This is more of an issue in German language, where there's the informal "Du" with first name and the formal "Sie" with last name. In Living History circles, it's rather usual to use the informal address, but not everybody ordering in my shop is a LH person, and you can annoy people either way when addressing them in the wrong way (or the unexpected way). It's easy for me when someone goes "Hallo Frau Kania" in their mail, or "Hallo Katrin" - then I'll just pick the same style. Many enquiries, however, have no such hint, and I know even less which way to pick when I have a question regarding an order.

So if you have a customer account, you can now pick whether you want formal or informal address, and I finally have a way to tell what people expect from me. Yay! (Provided it gets filled out - because it's non-obligatory so as not to annoy people.)

Now there's just a few smaller issues to solve, like the backup only working under php 5.x instead of the 7.x which I'd prefer to switch to. Probably due to some other thing throwing stuff into the gears, though I have not found the culprit yet.

I also had an issue with this blog today - I suddenly lacked all admin rights, which was rather annoying. (Imagine entering your blog space and finding you have no access to anything...) Fortunately (haha) I already had this issue once before, so I sort of knew what to do, and a quick google and a bit of mucking around in the phpMyAdmin database later, here I am, blogging happily at last, if a little later than intended...

And now for some dinner. And then for some deep thinking on how to slim down my presentation. Twenty minutes, folks. Twenty minutes is just sooooo short...

I'm usually somebody who takes a good look at things, and sometimes a second good look. Or a good sniff. That, by the way, is something I probably got from my mum, and the cause of a goodly amount of amusement for the most patient husband of them all.

Imagine having something that needs an odour check. A sock, for example, that you are not sure about. Or some food that might have gone bad or might still be fine... obviously, someone needs to sniff it and decide. So. You bring your nose close enough, and in some cases... well, let's just say that in some cases, it is really not something you want to have in your nose for a second longer than necessary.

However... my mum has this weird thing where, when she has something that falls into this "smells abominable" category, she actually takes a second sniff. Just to make sure that the thing really smells as badly. And I seem to have inherited that habit... hence the cause of amusement. Especially since I don't really want to sniff it again, but it happens so fast my brain (fogged by the horrendous fumes from the first inhale) only kicks in after the second breath.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="393"] My consolation for this double-smelling is this XKCD comic. At least I can feel sciency when going "uargh!" for the second time.


Looking is much less of a thing in that regard, obviously. And many times, that second look is not necessary - but whenever I slack on that, it seems like something is always lurking to hit me with it.

Two cases in point: Yesterday, I finally sat down and did a batch of small updates to the website - one general update to fix a possible security issue, and a few smaller extension updates. Usually, I'm always taking a look at the site after this. Yesterday... I didn't. Which means I only found out this morning that everything looks dandy and fine in the backend (where I am most of the time when I am using the site, obviously, since that's where the work happens), but the frontend, which is the actual important bit of the site... only shows a blank page. Grrr.

(The fact that you are reading this now shows that I have fixed the issue in some way.)

Also yesterday, I was buying a set of two knickers... and found out at home that the one I tried on had the correct size. The other one, though (on the same hanger, as they were supposed to be a set) is a size larger. Sigh. So it's back to the shop now...

And the moral of the stories? Don't slack on your double-checks, or it might bite you in the behind. And that is never a nice thing.

Today is not as nicely warm and sunny as yesterday - the ideal weather to gear up with a cup of coffee or three and take stock.

I have a current count of things in stock, obviously, due to the webshop - but there's sometimes a little safety margin between the number of things listed in the shop and the things actually in stock - in case I need an extra because something gets lost in the post, or because something sold in real life versus via the online shop, for instance. Plus, from time to time, something gets lost or breaks while on an event... which means it's good to have a spare or two.

This, however, also means that occasionally I need to go through the actual, real, current stock and make sure that the numbers still match (or match as far as I intend them to). And since more fairs are coming up... now seems to be a good time. Especially since taking a look at all the things and counting them up means I can check their packaging, too - and in some cases re-pack into a smaller, or more sensible, or sturdier, or otherwise better way. Which is also a good thing to do before an event, as every big box takes up space, and space to store the stock is always, always less than it could be.

So you can picture my workspace cluttered with boxes and things in various states of packedness and unpackedness; with me and my list and my trusty cup of coffee in the middle of it. I'll spare you the picture of that clutter - instead, take this gratuitous picture of the sole sunflower that came up in the garden this year (even though I scattered seeds really generously):


It has grown into a very tall and very lovely plant - I'm just a little sad that it's the only one...

A long while ago, I wrote a blog post titled "How to untangle a skein of yarn". The reason for this post was my having had a, hm, let's call it an incident with a winder and a skein of yarn. Of very fine, lovely and pricey silk yarn.

Cue the necessity to find out how to untangle said skein and salvage the yarn. That inspired the blog post, and it's since been one of the most read posts, as well as a rather high-ranking result when looking for instructions on how to untangle yarn in a search engine.

So I've finally translated the post into German, and it's now available as text in both English and German on my main website. I do hope it will help more people in the future!

In completely unrelated news - we went indoor bouldering on Sunday, and that was a lot of fun, plus resulted in sore arms for me today. We'd been climbing (classical top-rope climbing) years ago for a while with some friends, but never got into it on our own. Bouldering doesn't require ropes or harnesses and somebody you can trust to secure you; instead, you pick a route and get started. Plus the climbing gym had a nice café to hang out with friends. We're definitely planning to do that again in the future!

Well, it's not exactly monsters that are munching all the time... but there are a few things afoot right now that do. One of them, due this morning: another update of the webshop, followed by a few necessary tweaks. There's some more coming up, as I will finally get the fix (it's on its way) for an issue-free login possibility with email address instead of the username (that nobody remembers anyway).

There's some other stuff going on behind the scenes - more prep work for events later in the year. Taking care of some insurance stuff for my one-woman company. Organising things to prepare for the Great Tax Filing of 2016 (as every year). Plus, we're having my parents over for a few days at the moment, so some family time tends to creep in - no wonder the time wooshes by faster than I can say "wow, it's afternoon already".

Also? It has snowed again today. Huge big flakes. Just when I thought we're finally going for spring... oh well.

Yes, I'm sure the last thing you want to hear about (again!) is the website stuff I've been dealing with... but bear with me one last time, as it's not my own website. Instead, it's the site of the European Textile Forum - which also had to transfer to a new server when I was changing my provider.

I took the opportunity to do some long-overdue overhauling of the site as well. It's not completely done yet (there's more stuff lined up to be made available again, in the new structure and hopefully in a more accessible way), but it's online, it's serviceable, it now also runs on Joomla! and there are a lot of small, behind-the-scenes changes that should make organising work for the next Forum a good bit easier for me. (Easier is always nice.)

[caption id="attachment_2048" align="alignnone" width="640"] This is how the page looks now - much nicer than before, I think. I hope you like it, and like always, if you have feedback - it's more than welcome!


I asked my new Internet guy to make the connection to the new place yesterday, and it went through delightfully fast, so you can now join me in enjoying the new site. And if you're interested in the Forum, or know somebody who might be, there's a newsletter you can subscribe to and we'll send you the occasional news and Call for Papers.

(My new Internet guy, by the way, has the wonderful company name Schwarzkünstler. That translates, literally, as "black artist", and that would have been someone in the printing business way back when printing was still new and it was still considered an art. Which means, as the internet is sort of the new form of print in a way, I get to have a little private squee for that name every time I see it. Which is very, very often at the moment, with all the logging in and transferring files...)

Sometimes, you go into things a little naively, right? Well. When I was planning the blog migration, I was hoping that I'd like working with wordpress instead of blogger, but didn't test it much (as there was no viable alternative, I figured why test if I have to cope anyways).

In that case, it all worked out - I'm totally in love with the new blog platform. It's so much nicer, and so much easier to use, and it looks so much better, I'm over the moon (and I hope it's as much better for you as it is for me). Though I was in for a big shock this morning when I logged in and found that my user permissions had somehow, magically, changed to "subscriber" instead of "administrator", preventing me from doing any of the admin stuff like, say, moderate comments or write a new post. That must have happened when I told my account to call me "Katrin" and not "shopadmin", which I am, too, but not on the blog, thankyouverymuch. Good thing the Internet is there to tell me what admin rights look like in the mysql database (like this: a:1:{s:13:"administrator";s:1:"1";}), and where to find them in the table, so it was an easy fix.

Other things that I went in naively are not working as well yet. So I'm still hitting snags on the website relaunch, and some of them have hit me hard. Like the broken links problem.

The shop urls are rather robust, and so I had sort of figured that a simple redirect from the old shop subdomain to the new spot of the shop should work. (Naive, I know, but there wasn't really a way to test it either before the relaunch.) Well, it didn't (which you will have noticed if you've tried to click an older link to the shop from this blog, or anywhere else where the shop was linked to). I installed a plugin for Joomla called ReDJ (which has outstanding support, by the way, I totally recommend it), but it is not working for all old links yet. I'm working on it (or rather I have asked for help since I'm not able to figure it out on my own, see "outstanding support" further up).

These web page issues are like an itch I cannot stop to scratch, so I snuck some weekend work in. And that means that while a lot of the links are still broken, you will at least be getting a custom (and hopefully amusing) file-not-found page. Curious? You can try this if you want to know how it looks.

Some other things are also fixed now - there is a mobile blog menu (or should be - if you're reading this on a mobile device and cannot find a link to the menu at the very bottom, please let me know). There's also a fix installed for the nasty redirect to the main page, away from the shop, when you have logged into the shop. A few more other things are on my list, but they are not as time-critical (or as annoying), or as quick to implement and so will have to wait a few more days.

Other shop things will have to come first... like the addition of new spindle whorls (I have a new type to offer), and I also have cochineal powder for sale now. They need photographs first, though, and descriptions - the first I will be adding into the new shop. Stay tuned! And if you find something that doesn't work (in addition to the links, that is) please do let me know!