My last template was pretty, but had a lot of really annoying features that were slowly driving me nuts. I couldn’t ever get the sidebar working how I wanted, so it was really long and repeated information. The paragraphs were weird, in multiple ways. And, well, I was getting bored of it. So I searched around and found a new theme! I really like it. Much cleaner than the old one. When I was playing with the code for the theme, I noticed it came with options for other colors! I wasn’t even expecting that, so was VERY pleasantly surprised to find a purple option. :-) I hope y’all like it too!!

I’ve also added several new “features” to my blog. I’ve spotted the LinkWithin on a few other blogs and thought it was cool. After 5 years, I have quite a few archive posts. This randomly generates three archives from my blog at the end of each post. I have been having fun clicking on them and re-visiting those posts. :-) I hope you enjoy this feature too!!

Another thing I added to my sidebar was a sort of “this day in the history of my blog” sort of link list. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time and I’m so excited to get the plug-in to work! Over on the right-hand sidebar you’ll see a section called “A Year Ago Today…”. It lists all the posts I wrote on this month/day last year, the year before, etc. all the way back till 2004 (the year I started blogging). (Joanna, I think tomorrow you should check out what I wrote in 2006!) I think this is really fun, and it’s funny to see what things were important to me over the years. For example, reading posts written on what is now my wedding anniversary, before I knew I’d get married on July 29th. :-)

You’ll also noticed that I finally condensed my archives so they didn’t take up QUITE so much space but were still readily available. I like how it looks! (Paul did that; I can’t take any of the credit!)

One more thing… on the left-hand sidebar I have a section called “interesting links”. (I’ve actually had this for a long time, so you probably have seen it before.) Anytime I come across a news article or blog post that I find interesting, I save it to my delicious and it shows up there on my sidebar. You should check them out! If you always read through an RSS reader, you should jump over here every once in a while to see them. I think you can even subscribe to my delicious feed if you want to make sure you don’t miss any.

I think that’s it. I should probably get off the computer as my day is going to be really busy getting ready for going to Indiana tomorrow!