Tuesday, August 28, 2007

New Look for AnceStories

To my delight, I realized that I did not have to attend the training at my school district that I had signed up for today, because they are courses for standards I've already achieved. I'm relieved because I was up too late last night to pick up my daughter from a youth group activity, and six hours of sitting yesterday had wiped me out! This gave me another morning to work on my blogs and another afternoon to prepare my home and family for back to school.

You've probably noticed the slightly different look of the blog today. I found a layout for three columns for this template at Blogcrowds. Changing the layout didn't take long...adding back my widgets, ads and links took much longer. Fortunately, I thought to save all the coding for these to Notepad ahead of time, or I'd be gnashing my teeth!

I'm hoping with the graphics and ads on the left and the text links on the right, it won't look quite so visually overwhelming, and perhaps be easier to navigate.

New features include my "Popular Posts of 2007," found in the right sidebar under "Blog Archives." I've got links to the posts that had the most hits for each month this year, for easy finding. I've also added icons for quick bookmarking and RSS feed at the top of the right sidebar. My Categories are no longer in drop-down menu style, but in a list, with the hopes that some of my surnames will catch readers' eyes. I'm now an affiliate for Genealogical.com; be sure to check out their great books for sale to build your home library (see second banner ad on the left sidebar)!