After spending practically all of today working on the blog, I have finally managed to get everything finished in preparation for the FAQ. Firstly, I have majorly redesigned the right hand menu, so that there is no longer a huge list of categories when you first visit. The categories can now be seen only if you want to. I have used the same method - show/hide when you click on the link - for the archives link, and for a ‘blogroll’. I generally don’t like looking at really long blogrolls (a list of links to other people’s sites) myself, so I put it in a show/hide link to make them easier to view. (A show/hide link just means that, for example, the list of categories will drop down and ‘appear’ once you have clicked on the main ‘Show All Categories’ link)

I’ve also added a ‘popular posts’ link, which is just handy for me to use. And finally, I reworked the FAQ so that it was a page on its own. There is a long and complicated reason why I had to split the posts from this main page, but it’s obviously too techspeak to go into. Suffice to say that the FAQ will be extra handy, because the right hand menu for that page also has a link to show ALL POSTS in the FAQ - which means that you can find the right post easily and quickly, without having to trawl the archives/categories/pagination of posts in order to find… oh say, where to buy puppets, in amongst all the explanations of puppet types (that I have yet to write).

As easy as all of those modifications sound, it’s not. I don’t know how to code from scratch, and have been diving into the forums over at b2evolution.net (the blog program that I use is b2evo.) to find the clues. Furthermore, as mentioned above, this particular blog functions differently from most.

Anyway, this brings me to my final redesign point for the day, which is I have replaced the Puppet Resources page with a ‘Puppet Books’ page. The former page was going to be both a puppet FAQ and somewhere to list recommended books, but as I said, I had to do some splitting. This also takes care of one other thing I was planning on doing at some point: introducing advertisements on my blog.

I really didn’t want to do it - I hate looking at Google ads, especially when they are so inevitably inconsistent with the content on the actual site that is hosting them. But I’m taking a look at my web host costs, plus my monthly readership/hits, and it looks as though I may need to upgrade to a more expensive plan very soon. While I can afford the hosting at the moment, I am loathe to spend more money simply because I’ve run out of space to host my puppet pictures. Hence the advertising.

But, instead of bombarding you, the reader, with annoying advertisements on every page of the blog, I have opted instead to create an Amazon ‘aStore’, which is now visible on the Puppet Books page. Basically it’s like going to Amazon, except:

! I get to choose the products shown, which means only puppet or theatre-related books will be visible there

! You get to shop right here on my blog, which means I don’t lose my valuable (and small) readership to another site

! I get a small affiliate-based revenue from any sales made through my ‘aStore’

Feel free to ignore the page, just like any other ads. It also makes for a good recommended reading list, since many of the books I have purchased myself.

Hopefully with all this redesign done, I can get back to the more important thing of actually blogging about puppetry. And you know, making puppets…