Monday, January 21, 2008

Website, Blog, and MySpace Updates

My husband and I spent this weekend doing home improvements. Not the fix-the-plumbing kind of home improvements. That was last weekend.

Last weekend, a tree turned off our heat.

You wouldn't think this would be possible. But thanks to some twisted Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events, it is. You see, we have this lovely umbrella magnolia tree outside our kitchen. Its roots grew into some piping, which caused our sink to clog, which caused our dishwasher to
overflow, which caused water to seep through the floor into the basement and directly onto our boiler, which caused the wiring to short-circuit, which caused our heat to shut off. Really. This actually happened. It sounds funny. It wasn't. (Okay, it was a little funny.)

We plunged. We snaked. We Drano-ed. We called a plumber. The plumber broke the pipe. We called a different plumber. The second plumber performed a sort of sewer colonoscopy in which he sent a tiny camera through the pipe, and then he bored through the tree root...

Anyway, this weekend, our home improvement
s were to my online home. And I am even more excited about them than I was about boring through tree roots (though, I admit, that did make a cool crunching sound -- updating my website did not, thankfully, involve a crunching sound).

Newsletter Sign-Up

See the new sign-up area over in the blog sidebar? (If you're reading this on LJ or elsewhere, you can click over here to see it.) It's also on the Contact page of my website. We were up until 3am figuring out how to set that doo-hickey up. (Okay, technically, we were up until 1am figuring out how to set it up, then until 2am watching American Idol -- we had t
o see the guy with the shiny cape and the white-feather hat -- and then until 3am because we both zonked out on the chair.) But armed with a combined 37 years of schooling (not counting kindergarten), a Netscape HTML instruction manual from 1997, and the power of the internets, we were victorious!

And now you can sign up to receive my newsletter!

Not that a newsletter exists yet. But once one does, you could be the proud recipient. That will be very exciting for you, for me, for your neighbor who will hear the songs of joy that you are inspired to sing... Okay, perhaps it won't inspire singing. But I still hope you'll con
sider signing up for my newsletter. If you don't, then I'm just going to keep signing myself up, and that will just be pathetic.

Happy Newsletter Recipient

Blog Sidebar and Header

Look up! Cover art in the header! And look to the right -- we added Out of the Wild! And cute little award buttons! Yay for cute little buttons!

MySpace


We also updated my MySpace page to include Out of the Wild. And we added a countdown to the Out of the Wild pub date -- June 19, 2008! There were three options for special effects on the countdown: glitter on the edges, glitter overlay, and glitter on the words. I said yes to all of them. I believe the end result is tasteful, understated, and non-obtrusive. After all, you can never have too much glitter.

You can never have too much glitter.

Website

New home page! And a new Excerpts page. And a page with links to all the Obscure Fairy Tales that I've babbled about (thus far) in this blog. I also added a link to Miss Erin and Traci's book trailer for Into the Wild (on the ITW book page), the blurbs for Out of the Wild (on the OOTW book page), and a bunch of other little tweaks.

What do you guys think? Am I missing anything? Are there any other features or info that I should add?

Is it a bad idea to have a tree with Swiss-cheese roots right next to my house?

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9 Comments:

At 8:28 AM, Blogger Madison said...

It's true. There is no such thing as too much glitter.

 
At 12:20 PM, Blogger Erin said...

Thanks for linking the trailer!

I love the award buttons - so cute and important looking. :)

 
At 10:09 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Are you sure that was your magnolia tree growing into your pipes? Sounds more like the Wild...

 
At 4:26 PM, Blogger Sarah Beth Durst said...

Anidori-Isilee: In Disney World, all the little girls dressed up as princesses had glitter all through their hair. I'm sure their scalps will be sparkling for the next decade.

Erin: Thanks! I think I admired them for a full ten minutes after we added them to the page. :)

Judi: Our backyard really is the Wild. We have a hill as our backyard that is covered in brambles. When we bought the house, it was summertime, and we didn't find out until winter that there were stairs with railings leading up the hill... Gardening is not exactly our forte.

 
At 9:10 PM, Blogger Enna Isilee said...

Sounds lovely! (the glitter and the garden, not neccisarily the heat-killing tree)

 
At 5:33 PM, Blogger Sookie said...

Hee hee, I'm looking foward to Out of The Wild coming. Yes, I watched that guy on American Idol, too. It made me laugh s hard I think I actually started crying ("Brothers!").

 
At 1:37 AM, Blogger Sarah Beth Durst said...

Enna Isilee: Despite the vicious roots, the tree is actually lovely too. It has bright pink pinecones. Until we moved here, I didn't know any tree had bright pink pinecones.

Sookie: Yeah, he's my favorite moment of the Idol season so far. He was just so happy. I like happy people. :)

 
At 6:37 PM, Blogger Alyssa F said...

(Unrelated to post)
You've been tagged for a meme if you'd like to play!
http://theshadyglade.blogspot.com/2008/01/reading-meme.html

 
At 8:18 PM, Anonymous Cafe24 Demo said...

These updates are almost 4 years ago. Currently, there's a lot of changes now. :)

 

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