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As I alluded to in my last post, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about revamping this blog to suit my changing blogging habits. I have come to a lot of conclusions, and I have a general outline of a) what will occur on this blog between now and the new year and b) what changes I need to make to this blog, both internally and externally.

Within the next few days, I will be posting a “Best of 2009″ list of my favorite blog entries from this year, similar to the list that Amanda does with her blog at the end of every year. Not only will it serve a handy purpose of keeping all the links to what I consider to be my best or favorite blog entries in one place, it’ll be a nice way to say goodbye to the ol’ blogging schedule, as that will become a thing of the past.

Once I have finished my end of semester finals and returned home for winter break in mid-December, I will be putting this blog on Maintenance Mode and work on making all the necessary changes. There’s going to be a new structure, a new system, a new layout… new everything, essentially. I’ve already started to outline all the changes and I’m really excited to see how it all turns out.

I will be relaunching my blog on January 1, 2010 at 12pm CST. To celebrate, I will be holding a Twitter contest! It will run throughout the first week of January. The prize will be of the handmade variety (think back to my Crafting posts from last summer). I will announce the start of the contest both on this blog and on Twitter, so be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter if you haven’t already!

That, in a nutshell, is what my plans are for this blog between now and the new year. I’ll see you all on the other side!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this blog, and what direction I want its future to be in. On November 4, I put my blog on its third hiatus as of August. Considering I went from January – August with only a one-week hiatus in May, this says a lot about how my blogging habits aren’t working out with the demands of my personal life, and that some changes are necessary if I want to successfully continue blogging.

I have been doing lots of brainstorming/researching in the last couple of days, and I plan on doing loads more before I make any final decisions. I’m not totally sure where all of this planning will lead me, but I am excited to see what changes I decide upon and how they will help shape my blog. However, it is pretty safe to say that my blog will be experiencing a total and complete overhaul and will be newly relaunched in time for the new year. Relaunched with the possibility of a Twitter contest, perhaps…

I do know that I want to wrap up a year’s worth of blog entries somehow before I start my overhaul project, and all the changes I will need to make will probably result in a Maintenance Mode look until all the adjustments are completed. But I have plenty of time to figure this all out, and once I do, those that read this blog will be the first to know

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I hate that this is becoming a semi-regular thing, but here goes:

I’m putting this blog on another hiatus.

It’s not something I particularly enjoy doing, especially since I just came back from a previous hiatus a month ago, but it’s what I feel is necessary to do right now. Something I thought I had under control has never been further from my control in my life, and something that made me happier than I’ve ever been in a long time has left me with a lot of questions that need answering and some soul-searching I need to do.

Real life takes priority over anything online, of course. I need time to focus on real life and all of the issues I am encountering, and I can’t afford to take time away from that to spend on this blog. So, once again I am going to be semi-MIA while I sort out my mess of a life. I’ll be around on Twitter and LiveJournal so I won’t be totally missing, but until I’ve managed to figure out a few things I’ll be laying (lying?) low in the blogosphere.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Seeing as this blog has had the same layout ever since it opened in January 2009, I decided it was high time to give this blog a new look. It took me a while to find a theme I liked, and then it took me even longer to find one I liked that I could also tweak to my personal tastes with my limited HTML and CSS skills. But I finally got something together that I really enjoy even if I didn’t design it myself, so I’m happy with the outcome!

There are some very small changes, such as the addition of a tags page rather than having a huge tag cloud on the sidebar. There’s also a link to my RSS feed in the navigation. That’s pretty much it for structural changes; 99% of the “facelift” was purely aesthetic!

I’m working on coding in Gravatars in the comments section, although this might take me a while to figure out because of my limited coding abilities. I think that’s the only major thing I have left to get done – the rest are little minor tweaks that I’ll be fixing up in the next couple of days. If you spot any major errors, please let me know!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.