Two(-ish) years, 200(-ish) posts

I realized the other day that we just passed the two-year anniversary of this here blog.  :)  And at about the same time, we crossed the 200 post milestone as well.

Now, I'm no Pioneer Woman with a huge blog empire and massive following.  And I'm afraid I have no corporate sponsorships to offer an anniversary giveaway or something similarly fun.  But I did still want to mark this momentous occasion somehow...

So I decided to revamp the blog!  Gone are the blue and brown stripes and textured blue background.  Hello, green polka dots, cleaner lines, and snazzier header!  (I'd also hoped to install a custom font for the blog post titles, but that appears to require coding beyond my meager abilities... But look!  Pretty new header!)

Notice the beautiful family photo in the center of our new header?  That was taken by the fabulous Deborah Cull Photography -- we had a family session with them last month.  I'll be sure to post more of our favorites, after we get our print order in -- because yes, we're finally getting some family photos to hang on our walls!  So exciting!

We wanted to thank all of you for reading and keeping up with our little lives.  From the very first post where we fully accepted the Keddiebears "brand," through the bump watch and Joshua watch series, it's been tons of fun chronicling our lives here.  And we're always surprised at just how many people are following this blog!

So yeah.  Thanks for reading, for commenting, and for keeping in touch with us.  We love you all!

Some blog housekeeping

We're implementing some changes here at Keddiebears central, hopefully for the better, so we wanted to give all of our faithful readers a head's up, and apologize for any broken links or weird formatting while we put the new formatting in place...

For a while now, I've wanted the ability to post larger photos. Over the last several months, I've been tweaking the background image and the code in order to expand the main column of this blog, but there's only so much you can do with a 2-column blog before you start getting wider than the average person's internet browser screen. Then it occurred to me -- why have two columns at all?

So the biggest change is the shift to a one-column template. (And I'm so proud of myself for being able to figure out the coding necessary to make this shift!) The widgets that used to be in the right-hand sidebar are now shifted either to the new linkbar at the top, or in the footer at the bottom. So if you want to see what other blogs we're reading these days, click on the "Blogrolls" link at the top. And if you want to go back and read all of our archived posts, check out the "Blog Archive" widget at the bottom!

Now that we're a one-column blog, I've gone back to the last few posts and uploaded larger versions of those photos. Do let us know what you think -- especially if the photos are now too large for those of you with slower internet connections.

And let us know if you come across any broken links or other wonky items. I'm trying to test everything as we go, but I may miss things.

Hope you enjoy the new and improved Keddiebears blog!

And since I can't write a post without a photo... Here's one of my latest favorites of Joshua, holding his head waaay up like a big boy!

Life's Little Joys

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
-- Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)

The "common thing" that is bringing a smile to my face right now? Fixing the annoyingly ungrammatical "1 comments" bug in Blogger!

As I was contemplating starting a new blog, I was attracted to all the very pretty, very personalized blogs I was seeing out there. I started doing some research to see what (free) options were available, and came across one particular gem of a website, Blogger University, which compiled lots of simple and useful hacks and coding tweaks, designed for use on the Blogger template. I highly recommend this site, for those of you who want to make minor changes to the basic template, but have zero HTML/XML knowledge.

After learning how to customize the header with my own image, and figuring out how to add that cute little teddy bear favicon to the status bar, I was absently clicking through various other options, when I saw it. A fix to the one thing that had always, always bugged me about the basic Blogger template. "Fixing the '1 comments' bug in Blogger Beta."

Maybe it's just me and my OCD need for grammatical perfection, but it bothers me that the Blogger template is programmed to always list "n comments." This works just fine when you have zero comments, or two or more, but if you only have one comment posted, you're stuck with "1 comments."

Making the change was super easy. So easy, in fact, that I wonder why Blogger doesn't just do this automatically...

But I'm going to choose to extract happiness from the fact that I fixed the bug. Woohoo, no more cringe-inducing grammatical errors!