Cold Climate Gardening

Thank you for nominating this blog for Best Garden Blog Design. I’ve put a lot of thought and hours into the design, and I’m pleased that you appreciate my efforts.

According to the Mouse & Trowel website, “the Mouse & Trowel Awards were created by freelance writer and garden blogger Colleen Vanderlinden to honor and reward excellence in online gardening. Awards for a variety of blog and website categories, as well as podcasting awards, are awarded every May after nomination and voting phases.”

You don’t have to be a garden blogger to vote. You don’t have to blog at all to …

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One nice thing about the GWA Symposium is that most of the meals are donated by various member businesses. But we all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, or a free breakfast, for that matter, so you probably already guessed that the business that pays for breakfast thereby procures the opportunity to speak to us while we are eating.

On Saturday morning this privilege went to Scotts Miracle Gro. (I can hear some of you booing and hissing already. Will it appease you any to learn that Bradfield Organics and SafeLawns.org got the floor for Sunday’s breakfast? The irony wasn’t lost on some of us. There’s room for all kinds in the GWA, especially if they’re paying for breakfast.) I was surprised at the level of conversation going on around me while the presentation was being conducted. Apparently just because someone gets up to talk, the members don’t feel obligated to listen. Some people claim the microphone wasn’t working. Perhaps the temptation to catch up with long lost friends was too great. Or maybe some people were remembering a certain lawsuit and were deliberately being rude.

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I’m starting a new website to explain blogging and related technical matters in plain English. It’s called Blogging Art and Practice.

There are some things about blogging that involve technical skill or know-how. I call those practices. I strive to use the best practices, to make my blog easier for people to read, for search engines to find. But there is an art to blogging, too. It involves finding your own voice, expressing your view of the world, writing well.

I’d like to help you with both of those. As a start, I’ve added the handout that I developed for the garden blog presentation that I gave at the Garden Writers Association symposium last month. I’m hoping you will …

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Boredom isn’t enough to motivate me to redecorate my walls or my website

“Why are you changing your design?” some of my children asked, as I was making preparations for the Big Day. I could have said, for the same reason many people re-paint their walls or buy a new dress: tired of the same old thing. But frankly, that doesn’t motivate me to redecorate my home or update my wardrobe. For me, increasing efficiency and usability was a far tastier “carrot” to compensate for the “stick” of a website overhaul.

My old design (or theme, as it’s called in WordPress circles) looked great, but wasn’t created with the most efficient code even at the time, and being old, couldn’t take advantage of the latest features of the WordPress software. Even worse, with certain operating systems running certain browsers (most notably Windows 2000 running IE), a lot of the type in the old design was so tiny it was illegible. Not good.

So late last fall I went theme shopping.

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I have just upgraded WordPress again. This time it combined link categories and post categories, so quite a few things need to be tinkered with. I will also be changing my theme shortly. Actually, I am going to change the theme first and then tinker, otherwise I’ll be tinkering twice. Sigh. The bottom line is, the front page should be fine, once I change the theme, but the rest of the site might be strange until I tinker with it. Here goes!

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