I posted this lengthy thing yesterday, and for some reason it disappeared. Hence the ‘Thanks’ post instead, which I was saving for a week’s time. I had drafted it, and when I noticed that nothing new appeared in yesterday’s RSS feed, I wondered what had happened. The long other post seems to have disappeared.

The crux of it was that a customer had a lot of trouble making payment for a sock puppet, and I tried to make the order for her. I ended up typing the email address wrong (never type and use the handheld phone at the same time) and had to do it again. It still wouldn’t work. She tried signing in and couldn’t access anything. I didn’t know what was wrong, not being with her at the time… It turns out she was logging into the blog system, instead of the Shop, which of course, is run using a different program. There’s no bridge between the two.

That’s one of those things you tend to forget about; half of the problems with websites is not that the site doesn’t work, but that visitors always have a way of finding new methods of using the site and finding all the loopholes - and then getting stuck. Suffice to say I have made short notices on both of the login forms to make it clearer that they are not interchangeable, and have added a new login link to the Shop page too - making it easier to find. 

Anyway, I’ve been pretty busy for the past two days trying to sort it out. There’s more to the story, which I’ll post about after the holidays 

I have plenty of good stuff sitting in my inbox to post about next week: I’m going to do a book review on The Space Between, a book by and for Australian puppetry! It’s got all the good stuff about 70s, 80s and 90s puppetry - I believe it was published in early 2000 and something - so it’s up to date and should be quite a good addition to the articles here.

Another thing is some cool eyes that I’ve made using 5 cent rainbow coloured balls. I’ll also have movement on the Corsina Fair movie, and possibly a product. There’s even the possibility of a very cool shadow puppet technique that I’m dying dying dying to try… You’ll have to wait and see, it’s going to be so good, I may even use it for my movie.

There’s plenty of announcements of Aussie puppetry events, including a festival in Brisbane.

So yeah, next week is going to be awesome!