Today i am the featured blogger on my friend Calee’s blog, chimesblog. Calee is a good friend of mine and is going to be one of my bridesmaids, but she’s also a very talented designer and crafter and one helluva dedicated runner. She does marathons and stuff. A force to be reckoned with, for sure.
So if you’re new here, welcome! A lot of my writing is purely about my own life, but i also like to review books, movies and music, rant about religion, post my photography, and correct people’s English. 
I’m also a bride-to-be, and i’ve been keeping track of the things that i find inspiring as i do my planing on my tumblr. Have a look around and please enjoy!
You’ve probably noticed by now that the site is looking a little different (unless, of course, you’re only viewing the feed). I designed this theme a year ago and have only now gotten around to actually building it. I know it’s very simple and not terribly exciting, but i just wanted a change. I’ve got a wedding website to attend to, so i probably won’t get to design a new theme for this blog for at least another year, at which time i will *hopefully* be migrating to a new domain anyhow (stephanieafink.com?).
The archives have been moved to their own page and i’ve added a search bar, which was a long time coming. I’ve also added avatars back to the comments, so you WordPress users will be able to show me your lovely faces. My blog matches my portfolio website now, which i think is nice.
I don’t want to clutter up the sidebar, but i think it probably needs something. An RSS icon? A blogroll, perhaps? I’ve been learning some cool WordPress stuff at work, so the blog may be evolving over the course of the next few weeks. By and by i should be able to post some new websites that i’ve designed as well. Stay tuned.
So last week there was the whole incident where Yahoo! put my little post about the Tropicana redesign two clicks from their homepage, resulting in a lot of traffic to the site. This much, in fact:
This is a graph of how many visitors my site gets each day, and on July 2nd, last Thursday, you can see there’s a giant spike where it goes up to 32,301 visitors. Previously i’d been getting eight or twelve people a day, maybe. The total number of comments on the Tropicana post is over 150 now, and the Sierra Mist post has another 25.
Alas, i have zero new subscribers, so the number of visitors has gone pretty much right back down. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted!
Here is a screen capture of today’s Yahoo! Home page:
…and here’s what you see when you click “find more on the Tropicana redesign”:
My blog post is the first hit! Needless to say, i’ve been getting a LOT of new comments on the Tropicana redesign post. I just want to extend a warm welcome to all the new visitors to the site, and apologize for not doing a redesign of my own before you all came to visit. I had no idea that i should be expecting a crowd. 
Sorry, that’s what one professor or another used to call writing down or drawing whatever comes to mind without editing or censoring it. That’s what i plan to do now. Sorta.
The photo is of my new Paperwhites which Nathan bought for me a few days ago, for no particular reason. They’re lovely and still have their bulbs, but they get top-heavy when in bloom and fall over and stand back up again regularly. It’s quite beyond me.
Our oil painting class began last night. We’d been making bets with each other about the sex, age, and crankiness of the teacher, judging solely by the provided list of required materials. We figured male, middle-aged, fairly strict and moderately arrogant – or maybe that was just my bet. Turns out i was totally off – she’s young and quite nice. I’m definitely excited to start learning about painting technique, because although i do pretty well with dry media of all sorts, i’m clueless about paint.
Obama is President, hooray!!
Not a lot else to report. It’s still cold. I haven’t begun packing yet. I still have my job… I think. I still see English errors everywhere, but I’m feeling less enthusiastic about blogging them, because i see people whom i know damn well read my blog continuing to make the same mistakes. It’s good for a giggle at best, but nobody’s actually learning from me. And maybe that’s okay and it’s still worth doing, i’m just not sure yet.