As every year, Amica and Maria, the two wonderful textile nerds (that is according to their own description, mind you) behind the blog Historical Textiles are making a textile advent calendar. As every year, I'm only catching on halfway, and then have to catch up.

Do pay them a visit - there's some wonderful photo of an old bit of fibery goodness every single day!

Here, stuff is progressing. Coffee is being drunk.
I'm still hard at work on the Forum webpages, getting them into a nicer order and stuff on them easier to access. Putting more stuff in there, too - which means I might need to up my contract with my provider a notch, to have more space for the stuff.

I'm also trying to finalise a little survey about the Forum to see where we might be heading. I love the format of having one full week, and the combination of a lecture and some practical part, but it might pose too much of an initial hurdle to those not already straddling the line between theoretical or academic work and crafts practice and experience. I also have the suspicion that a full week is too long for quite a few people - so Sabine and I have talked it over, and Michael and I have, and we might do a bit of a change, this year or next, depending on how it goes.

The survey is not quite finished yet, but I hope to get it done and out and tested later today, and then it will be time for a newsletter and spreading it out, hopefully gaining a lot of insights. Ideally, I'll also get the site done and polished before it goes out, but I think I might not, and I'd rather have more time for the survey than less - so it all depends on how productive I'll be today. And possibly early tomorrow. So... I should get back on it, right?

The website redesign is finally all done and finished. There's a few more articles I'd like to add to the main page, but they are not time-critical - and the rest is all done. The menu structures are fine, all the links seem to be working, and a few of the remaining tweaks and checks can only be done once the site is connected.

I've tried hard not to waste too much time on small things, but then sometimes it's the small things that make all the difference. So now and again, I spent a few hours trying to get something to work because it would be oh so pretty, or oh so cool. A good bunch of hours was also used up because I had to learn something new - how to handle css stuff, or how I have to build the menu structure in Joomla! for my breadcrumbs to work properly, or how to size and position an svg grapic. (SVGs are cool. They are vector graphics that you can have your browser draw, so they are nice and nifty and resize very, very well. If you know how to resize them - so in case you need somebody to explain it to you, too, here's a wonderful blogpost about it.)

So tomorrow will be the day - I'll take the old shop offline, migrate the data to the lovely new shop, and then ask for the connection to be made. That will probably take between a few hours to a day or even two, depending on how fast the name-servers catch the update. This is all very, very exciting, and I hope it will all go well!

Here you go, a little link salad, just for you:

The concept of Home in the age of the Internet: here.

German place names, in phonetic English, on a map (embedded in a German article): here.

Larsdatter's content index for the series "Medieval Textiles and Clothing": here.

The (now finished) project homepage of "Fashioning the Early Modern": here.

Joconde, the collections database and portal of French museums (in French, naturellement): here.

Otherwise, thank goodness it's Friday - this week was chock-full of work. It was nice, gratifying work for the most part, but that still means I am really looking forward to the weekend!

Yesterday, I received a mail informing me that a colleague had stumbled across a .pdf version of a Festschrift for Frans Verhaeghe, online and downloadable free of charge. Since I am a curious person, I took a look at the link she had posted. And since I'm a very curious person, I then took a look at the site that hosted the file.

Today is one of those days when I really don't know what to blog about. I don't even have a bad joke to share with you. I can tell you that I am going to bake a cake today, but that is probably not going to interest you; or that I have a pair of socks that I'm (theoretically) working on and a jacket that I'm also (theoretically) knitting - but I haven't done any stitch on them in a few days. And that is probably also not going to interest you.

So why don't you go and look at a random xkcd strip instead?