There was more packing of parcels today, and more prep work for the courses - both the spinning one, and the sewing one. My dressing of the distaffs was supervised by an expert for fluffyness and hair:



I've also been dabbling a bit on the shop relaunch. It's coming along, albeit more slowly than I'd like it to, but hey, what can you expect regarding anything that involves computers, right?

Basically, the shop and site relaunch means a clean, new installation with a template that is compatible to Joomla 4, and I'm trying to find the right balance between "keep everything as it is and get it done as quickly as possible" and "this is the perfect time to make some changes and make everything better and add a gazillion new texts and images to the page which means I will never ever be finished".

The main points are a new shop installation (in hopes that the glitches that happened in the past will then be history), a blog migration to a different system in Joomla (because I'm not sure if my current wordpress-in-joomla thing will continue to get support) and, yes, a little bit of restructuring of the main page. According to my tests, the new template will also mean the site is visible, and mostly useable, without javascript turned on. (The shop, of course, needs JS to function.)

So - if you have any suggestions for the site, or site structure, or comments on what you like on the current one, or dislike - please let me know in the comments. I'm grateful for any input, whether it's regarding the blog, the shop, or the main page, the content or the layout.

I'm back from the winter break - so: Happy New Year to all of you!

There's a bit of catching up to do, obviously, and one of the most important tasks of today was finish packing all the orders that came in during the break. I've been working on that, and a bunch of other things, the past few days already. There were hopes that I'd actually get a bit more of the things on the list done, but website relaunches are a notoriously obstinate thing. (There's progress, though.)

Packing has been successfully done, though, and the things are going to the post now.

There's also some other shop stuff on the line, including a few new things to be sorted into stock - I have a new shape of spindle sticks. Those need to be described, and photographed, and put into the shop. I also have to take new photos of the pearwood spindle sticks, as the current batch is much, much more varied in colour and texture than the previous one:

[caption id="attachment_6666" align="alignnone" width="201"] New pearwood spindle sticks for the shop - now in a larger range of natural wood variation than before...


Already in there are the new online courses, both in German: One for Medieval Spinning on February 6, and one for sewing techniques on March 6.

There's been some more behind-the-scenes website wrangling, though that was not quite successful. (If you've run across broken image links in the blog - I'm working on it, they will be fixed soon. This is a side effect of me getting rid of the many, many extra images that Wordpress generates when media is uploaded... which cluttered up my webspace.)

I hope the other issue, which regards the new site and especially its template (sigh...) will get better with some support... and now I'm really looking forward to the weekend.

Which promises to be quite sunny, and nice, and warm.

There also was some spinning! Here's the results:


One very nice skein of dark, rather shiny yarn, which was a joy to spin up. As opposed to the "fun" spinning I'm currently doing with some mystery fibre (well, I know it's wool, but I forgot exactly which kind) which has a lot of crimp, and somehow does not please me at all to work with. I'll stick with it some more, though, so that we can have some yarn for the Textile Forum to play with.

In the context of all the website-looking and preparing updates, I've also installed a link checker on the blog. And, lo and behold, it has found broken links... quite a lot of them, actually.

About three hundred of them.

It makes me realise, once more, how short-lived quite a lot of things on the 'net are. Some of the links were easily fixed (old, abandoned blogspot profiles, for instance - I just unlinked them); some others pointed to sites that don't exist anymore but have an wayback archive link, which could be used. Finally, some are just going nowhere and there's no record of anything anymore.

This blog has been running since 2008, so it's a small wonder not all links are working anymore. Also, being around like this time here on the net, somehow I feel like that makes me a weirdly ancient something. It's a nice feeling, on the other hand, to be a weirdly ancient something still going on, and still there, and still blogging!

When I started out with my first steps on the 'net, with a little private homepage on Geocities, it was coding html by hand in a text editor. After starting pallia as a company, I did my website by hand as well. At that point, frames came up as the newest hot shit on the block.

Then there was the day when I looked for proper shop software, and found Joomla!, and consequently used that as well. That was also the point in time when I stopped doing everything myself, and instead relied on templates by others. I can sort of do CSS, but have never really practised it; I understand a tiny little bit of how php scripts work, but that's it, and I'm not up to writing anything from scratch anymore, and haven't been for a very long time.

Then the time came for the relaunch of blog, website, and shop all in one... then, a few years ago now, the big migration from one version of Joomla! to the next one, and soon that is going to happen again.

Things certainly stay interesting that way. And though it's a lot of work, and eats up quite some time, I'm still fairly happy with being my own IT department. After all, it means I have a good overview of what is up on my webspace, and lets me fix some things easily and quickly. Plus, admittedly, I think a lot of it is fun work too!

 

Somehow, IT maintenance stuff can become an incredible black hole for time and brain power. It certainly is nibbling on mine, and more than its fair share!

There is some need for a good, solid overhauling of the webshop and site, unfortunately. Things have gotten rather, um, spacious... as in the many images in use in the blog, and the website, are taking up quite a bit of space.

There's also been more and more issues with the shop not working properly recently, and there will be a new version of Joomla!, the platform that this whole shebang here runs on, in the foreseeable future. That means I'll need a few new things for the site (among them a new look, as the old template is not compatible with the new version, or at least that's how it looks).

So there's been some searching, and some installing and trying out things, and so on. It will stay quite, quite interesting, I'm afraid.

I also found out that there is a heap of broken links in this blog - small wonder, it's been running for so long that a lot of the sites and pages I have linked to in the past went out of business ages ago!

But since I'll change things around anyways, now is your chance to tell me if there's anything you'd like to have different in the future. Is there something missing on my website? Is there anything that does not work for you, or works really well?

Things here are busy, busy, busy - but in a good way. There's sending out of goods ordered through the online shop, I've just sent back the corrected final proof for a paper (about spinning), and I've also sent out the results of a museum/writing project that I did together with Helga Rösel-Mautendorfer, my wonderful colleague from Austria. It's information about Iron age clothing, and how to make it, intended for use by schools to make these kinds of garments for the children.

There's also, to my great delight, more European Textile Forum planning going on. It does look like numbers are falling about everywhere, and that we can go ahead with our Forum plans. So there will be a newsletter as soon as I can manage, and a website update, and much more planning in the background.

Having the Forum to look forward makes the loss of the real-life NESAT a bit more bearable for me... a week or so ago, an email came announcing that NESAT would be online only. Finland is apparently quite restrictive regarding people coming into the country, and the organisers of the conference didn't want to risk issues with participants not being allowed in, or having to quarantine. So it will be a virtual conference only.

I'm really sad about this, though I can understand the reason behind it, and wouldn't want to be caught myself in quarantine in Finland instead of actually attending the conference. Hopefully there will be another chance to visit Finland at some point in the future, and there will surely be a next NESAT which, unless a new pandemic strikes, should be a proper real-flesh-and-blood one!

There's been some looking at files, and more looking at files, and comparing, and downloading old versions. There was me, thinking I had an idea about where to search for whatever would fix the issue.

The issue was the following: I could install a new theme for the blog without trouble, and I actually managed to find one rather quickly that a) displays comments and b) does not look horrendous (and actually took most of the existing style things without me making it first). However, the menus for navigation, both at the top and at the side, were missing, and I could not find out how to get them in.

The solution was delivered, like so often, by the Most Patient Husband of Them All - who listened to my complaints and then asked some questions which led to me testing something just to make sure it would look one way, as I expected - and promptly finding that it did not, thusly pinpointing where I'd need to look and what for.

Turns out that you have to list the theme as one of the allowed themes in a php file in the Joomla! component... and that's actually all you have to do. It's literally add one single line in the right file, and all is set to go.

Well, there was a little bit more fiddling with the looks in one or two bits, but for the main issue - that was the thing. So I could have gotten away without looking at all the files. In theory, because finding that the solution was not in them was necessary for the searching in the correct spot.

Anyways - you should now be able to see the comments again, and hopefully see the blog nicely and properly displayed. If it's not, please do let me know about the issues, so I can try to fix them!