Do Not Adjust Your Sets

I don't like Crinklybee to look neglected, so I decided to do a bit of gardening.  But one thing led to another, and what started out as a 30-minute Sunday afternoon potter around- a touch of pruning to the blogroll here, perhaps, and some minor tending to the sidebar there- ended up, fifteen hours or so later, in a complete overhaul.  The blogging equivalent, if you will, of those garden redesign shows where some poor bloke comes home from work to find his shed gone, a bulldozer where his prize geraniums used to be, and the attentions of his wife being competed for over flutes of licence-fee subsidised champagne by Alan Titchmarsh and some tattooed geezer calling himself 'Handy Andy'.   Anyway it is the sort of thing that absolutely merits a guided tour, so here is a breakdown of what is new/changed/utterly unrecognisable from the place we used to know and love around here:

1.. The Blogroll... gone!

We will start I think with that most delicate of operations, the pruning of the blogroll.  I've uprooted all the ones who don't update any more, and then (because I can't bear to put any of them in the compost bin) lovingly replanted them in a new place called 'Gone But Not Forgotten' where it is forever 2004.  Among other vintage delights, you will find in these quarters Eclectic Boogaloo, the first blog I ever clicked on during a lazy afternoon at the flangedesk.  Crinklybee, as I may have mentioned several times before, started out as a pale imitation. 

 

2... The Blogroll... new!

In the olden days (I'm talking about 2004 again here) I was forever wandering off down promising-looking paths and emerging into clearings chock-a-block full of enticing new blogs to while away my hours at the flangedesk with.  To be honest with you, I feared that the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, and other social phenomenona that scare the living Bejesus out of me might have meant that those halcyone days of serendipity were over for good.  But lo!  One afternoon I clicked on- oh, somewhere or other, but it might have been here- to find that, if you look hard enough (or are perhaps just lucky enough) then there are still plenty of places where fresh, engaging, writers flourish like sunflowers.  In the path I wandered down, English people living in Belgium seem to be particularly prominent.  Which is either a reflection of that country's welcoming and thriving cultural scene, or an indication that it rains all the time in Brussels and there is nothing for it but to hide away in your attic with your laptop and moan about it.  (Come to think of it the subject of the latter link  is just about to move to Paris, which maybe tells us which possibility is nearer to the mark).

 

3.  Are you local?

Maybe it's because I have been writing about parochial matters such as school village fetes, but the make-up of the comment box of late has at times resembled the queue for the 192 bus to Piccadilly (or perhaps I should say the 197 to Oxford Road, which as anyone with a passing acquaintance of M19 will be aware, is an altogether diffrent proposition).  Either way these new visitors from nearby are most welcome, especially as they have led me to words like these-  and pictures like these.  Levenshulme, you see, is just like Brussels (that's right, it rains all the time we all really want to move to Paris, etc). 

 

4. Random photo thing

Joella (whose writing I admire immensely and plagiarised the first seven words of this post from) has this feature I have always admired where every time you visit you get a random photo in the top corner.  I always fancied having the same thing myself, not least because in these far-from-prolific times it would at least give people something new to look at when they come here searching in vain for a new post.  One plaintive email to the Typepad helpdesk (and several botched attempts on my part to follow their very clear instructions) later, and we have our very own Random Photo Thing, meaning that you can now look at wonky pictures of buses and tulips.  Don't all faint at once with gratitude, please.  Get a grip of yourselves.

 

5.  'Eyecatching' New Design

The one change you noticed before I insisted on giving you a guided tour of my innards.  Oh no, you hate it, don't you?  Ah come on you'll get used to it.  Anyway it's staying, at least for a  while, not least because Charlotte (who I trust implicitly in matters of design) took a look over my shoulder and declared herself charmed.  Also it is has bees in (not Crinkly ones but you can't have everything) which makes it Most Apt.  I'm sure we can come up with some explanation for the bear as well, if we think hard enough, but either way I'm not about to stand here and argue with fully-grown bears, even graphically-designed ones who appear to be afraid of bees.

So- er, that's it.  The guided tour is over and, although we cannot extend to licence-payer-funded champagne, why don't you all come inside for a nice cup of tea.  Now if I can just find where I have moved the kettle to...  

Comments

[joella]

You are very kind Mr Crinklybee. And congrats on the overhaul, I know how long these things take. Looks good. Nice murky colours. Ironically, that random photo thing is the reason I haven't gone there for so long - it's a custom bit of javascript that it took me ages to get right, and I can't face migrating it to a new Blogger template that would allow me to have all kinds of nice widgets. How strange to already have an old school blog, eh?

[Abby]

Eeeeee, I feel all clean and tidy coming here and I love the new design, especially the artificial wood. And I think those lovely bees have frog spawn on their heads, which is probably deeply symbolic. I will now go and check out the very organised new sections, and those Belgian blogs. You didn't used to work in a library did you?

[Z]

It looks splendid - and you read a lot of the blogs I do too, so I must check out some of the others.

[Sophia]

Mmmm...cyber wood paneling...

[looby]

Another vote for the new design here...it's a lot easier to read for us Gentlemen Of A Certain Age.

I loved the Belgian stuff - I do wonder sometimes if the Belgians and the English do share more than a proportionate amount of the world's stock of eccentricity, and those blogs bear that out.

And crikey...Claire Boob Pencil's stopped! That's the end of an era.