When Mel was asking me what I wanted my new design to look like, I basically said something like I want it clean, but I want it fun, because I’m trying to break out of my personal inclination towards boxes and lines and order and crispness. And I told her I like red, blue, and orange. The word “bubbles” or “lava lamp” may have come up somewhere in the process, I don’t even remember anymore.

And this is what she came up with. I could not have imagined this, but it is so perfect. It’s fun, it’s bright, the color palette is pleasing to my eye, it’s cute without shmoop.

So that’s the front end.

On the back end, as a Wordpress noob, I’m playing around with plugins. What I’ve currently got installed is a combo of recommendations and toys I’ve seen on other folks’ sites. Here’s what I’ve got installed right now:

• Akismet. Spam catcher. Default. No brainer.
• All in One SEO Pack. Seemed prudent.
• Feedburner Feedsmith. ‘Cause I wanted to use Feedburner for some nifty RSS feed tricks and tracking.
• flickrRSS. ‘Cause I wanted to put my latest Flickr photos in the sidebar.
• Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR). That’s how Mel puts the funky fonts in my headers.
• Google XML Sitemaps. Index my site! Please!
• Live Comment Preview. Because I think it’s neat, I like using it on other people’s sites, and it helps remind folks to close your damn tags.
• One of my big questions was what to do with my former linkblog. It was its own entity with it’s own funky formatting. The Sideblog plugin has saved my bacon. It’s even better than what I had before. Long story short, linkblog posts are in the sidebar, regular posts are in the main column, but they all show up together in the archives and the RSS feed. Brilliant!
• Simple Tags. Wordpress sucks at bulk editing of any kind, so I’m using a plugin to help with tag management.
• Subscribe To Comments. If I ever hit on a particularly hot topic and you want to follow it, you can.
• Twitter Tools. I have a presence on Twitter, Twitter has a presence on this site. (I won’t ever be posting the daily tweet digest; that’s way too redundant for most people.)
• Ultimate Google Analytics. Tasty, tasty data.
• WordPress Related Posts. I’m just curious to see what pops up. I can see an influence as I go back and add tags to the older stuff.

Today, kids, marks the 6th Blogiversary of swirlspice.

Well, not exactly, because it hasn’t been six years at this domain (started out on blogspot). And I did drop in some stuff into the archives that I wrote in the few months before September 26, 2002. But you know what I mean. This is the day. I know it is because I put it on my calendar so I could remember instead of having a vague sense that it was some time in September and then having to go dig through my archives every year and usually figuring it out after the actual date has passed.

So what you have before you is a spiffy new design courtesy of Mel and Sean at Emtwo Web Studios. Mel and I go way back. Before this blog, even! She’s the best.

I have to give major kudos to Mel and Sean. Mel somehow crawled into my brain and took my vague sense of what I wanted this place to look like and came up with something just perfect. And then there’s the matter of my spectacular hard drive failure (chronicled on Twitter) which took my nice neat Movable Type export with it (and I was so proud of myself for getting it successfully exported in the first place). And then there’s the part where I decided to switch hosts while all this was ongoing. They wrestled my babies back from my janky database and deposited into a fresh new Wordpress backend. I cannot thank them enough.

My thanks to Missy, too, because this was a wonderful birthday present.

Insert “work in progress” disclaimer here. I’m still mucking around with sidebars and there’s some backend stuff going on and I’m sorting through something like 3800 posts. I’ll point out features as they come up. Y’all all read this by RSS, anyway, right? You get the idea: posts, comments, colors, bubbles, whatnot.

I’m tickled pink by what Mel and Sean have made happen here and I’m excited about a seventh year of blogging.

Thanks, y’all.

With special guest…