Thoughts for 01/30/07

I really need to catch up on blog reading. I have a long list of knitting blogs which I'd like to keep up with, but find I'm always trying to catch up with all the old posts.

So I've switched over to New Blogger and like the new edit posts screen (the one where it enumerates all the published posts) and how you can easily tag them with labels. So I started to play around with the labels, adding a "free patterns" label to each of my pattern posts. After I was done, I was truly surprised to find that there were 28 free patterns on my blog. Is it really that many? I know I have them on my sidebar, however I never bothered to count them. 28 patterns since Aug 2006, that's an average of 4.6 patterns per months (over the last 6 months).

One thing I don't like is how New Blogger has changed the way the comments appear in my Gmail inbox. Comments from the same post show up as one discussion. The comments used to show up as individual email messages in Old Blogger; this made it a lot easier for me to manage which messages I want to respond to (marking those as "to respond" while filing the others away). I guess this old dog needs to learn new tricks to adapt with the new way the comment email show up in Gmail. Anyone have any tips to share?

With New Blogger you can see the number of comments for each post. This is very interesting. It is interesting to see which posts have more comments. Delurking post aside, I notice that most people were interested in my Persephone Scarf pattern post and my Heart Lace Cloth pattern post.

One thing I wish Blogger had "improved" on is not placing the "save as draft" button adjacent to the "publish" button. I can't tell you how many times I have hit the wrong button .... usually because I am in a hurry to finish up because the Boss (Miss M) is calling...

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Learned something new lately.... ok, I'm always learning something new but I thought this was really interesting. Elizabeth from the Carolinas Machine Knitting Guild emailed me about converting my Heart Lace Cloth pattern to a machine knitting pattern for one of their newsletters. I've heard of machine knitting however I don't know much about it. I didn't realize that knitting patterns had to be converted for machine knitting! I always thought you just used the patterns as-is. Seems like a lot more work to do machine knitting. You will find a sample newsletter on their site which will show you what machine knitting patterns look like. They look way different...

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Anyone ever notice how Roger Federer sometimes uses the side of his racquet for the first bounce when he bounces his tennis ball before a serve?


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