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Change is hard! Nobody likes change. But I promise the changes here will be all good and nothing important will change. Like, I’ll still be posting every day about old-fashioned recipes, crafts, cookies for Clover, lazy chickens, and other fun stuff plus nonsense.
What has changed is that there are now six blogs here. You may not have realized that yet, so let me explain. There have actually always been two blogs on this site—the main blog and the Daily Farm Photo blog. The Daily Farm Photo has always been a separate blog. (Since time eternal. In fact, it actually used to even be on a completely separate domain.) On the main blog, I was posting in five different categories—Cooking, Crafts, Barn (animals), Garden, and Country Living. All by themselves, those are each big topics. Some of my readers are interested in all of those topics (I love you!) and others are only interested in some of them (I love you, too!).
Breaking out the main blog into separate blogs for each topic provides several benefits, including fuller access to recent posts in each topic, allowing you to read more in the topics of interest to you, and allowing me to post in more than one of those topics per day without pushing off the latest post in another.
To see better what I mean, go ahead and check out the Cooking blog now. I’ll wait!
What you see on the Cooking blog are only cooking posts. The most recent cooking post is at the top, followed by the second most recent cooking post. Below, at the bottom, you’ll find post titles and links to the seven most recent cooking posts before that. It’s a veritable cooking headquarters! (And the Cooking archives are over here.)
The Barn blog is here. (The Barn archives are over here.)
The Garden blog is here. (The Garden archives are over here.)
The Country Living blog is here. As in, right here. If you’re reading this post, you are on the Country Living blog. (The Country Living archives are over here.)
The Crafts blog is here. (The Crafts archives are over here.)
And the Daily Farm Photo blog is here (where it’s always been, except for really way back when it was on a separate domain).
From the new main page, you can access the different blogs in a couple of ways. The slide show of latest posts shows a rotating visual of the most recent post in each blog. It’s dated so you can easily pick out today’s posts. You can click on the latest post you want to read right on the slide show as it goes by, or if you want to watch the slide show all the way through just to see everything that’s on there today, you can either wait for the post to come back around to click on the one that you wish to read (you can also use the back and forward arrows on the slide show to get there faster) or you can simply click on the menu buttons in the header to go to the blog of your choice. (I’ll also be adding text links on the main page, in response to requests.) Also, if you click on “Latest Posts” at the top right corner of the slide show box, it’ll give thumbnails to choose from to go to each post. So many ways to get here! Now back to the menu buttons–
The menu buttons in the header used to go to each blog category’s archive page. They now link to the different blogs. If you click on Cooking in the header, it will take you to my cooking blog. The archives will be accessed through new archive buttons that will be ready (I hope) sometime today. See the “Be Happy” button in the top right of the sidebar? On each blog page, it will be replaced by an archive button. For example, on the Cooking blog, the archive button will say “Cooking Archives” and will take you to the cooking archives page where you can find all my past recipes indexed and sub-categorized. On the Crafts page, you’ll see a “Crafts Archives” button and it will take you to all my past posts in crafts. And so on.
I’m adding features, not taking any features away.
As a side curiosity, this website originally had a main page (as do most websites). Here is a screenshot of the main page from about three years ago.
The blog was accessed through the menu buttons on the header from the main page. This was before I relaunched this website as Chickens in the Road, at which time I changed the name of the blog, the design, and redirected the main page to the blog page. Oh my, you should have heard the people complaining back then! Somebody even told me I was stupid. But it turned out okay, I think. I hope you will find that this change turns out okay, too. Sometimes growing means having the courage to change. (Life is a bold adventure. Come with me!) I also want to give a nod to my designer and tech, Emily, who has been working on this website with me for about five years now.
The new main page will provide access to new features still in the works. The blog has always been the heart of Chickens in the Road, and will continue to be so, but there are other features I want to add and the new main page makes room for them and provides access to everything. I hope it will also help new readers orient themselves to everything that’s available here, and also remind readers that have been around for awhile about some things they may have forgotten about! It also makes many more recent posts available and accessible. Changing over to six blogs is a work in progress right now (such as not having the archive buttons available yet). I’m also planning some header work that will help you identify more clearly which blog you’re on, and as I said, I’ll be adding text links to the newest posts on each blog to the main page as well—so bear with me as I continue to fine-tune the new system. (I’m listening and taking your suggestions!)
I love having six blogs to work with now—and I hope you’ll really enjoy that, too. I will be continuing to run a new post and a Daily Farm Photo post on my usual early wee hours morning schedule so that they are here for those of you who are early birds, but I will also be able to add other posts later in the day when I have time. It will give me a chance to do all sorts of special extras. I have so many fun ideas. Before you know it, I’ll be posting on all six blogs every day!
As soon as I turn into six people. And you KNOW I’m working on a frugal, easy, step-by-step plan for that! It will include chocolate.
P.S. If you subscribe to the Chickens in the Road RSS feed, Facebook, or Twitter, you’ll always be notified of new posts (throughout the day).
Posted by Suzanne McMinn on February 15, 2010
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Laura
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I have a blog I’d like to do this with (it’s a business related blog so I don’t post a link here). Could you tell me – was this difficult or expensive for you to implement?
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Thanks for all you do – now I have six more things to read here daily!!!
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Granny Trace’
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Snow’s all gone in Dallas. Yea!!!
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Susan
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We’ll be right here with you Suzanne, watching you grow!
And it’s FREE, what more could I ask for?????
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Deb
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Good luck with this new format, Suzanne. And I’m glad to know I won’t miss a single witty post.
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Suzanne –thank you for all of your hard work ..I don’t know how you get everything done.
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http://chickensintheroad.com/blog/2010/
I get my chronological order and all of the manly men get yarn free posts. Kudos for working to keep everyone happy!
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I sure hope this blog is paying off for you Suzanne. I worry about how much work it is for you and that it won’t support you….I’m being selfish, actually, because I don’t want your blog to ever end!!
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They say that no change, even a good one, is comfortable at first. But rest assured,I’ll hang in there ’cause I know it will not only become comfortable, but even better!
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around the website much faster now. Before it seemed to take forever for the pages to load on my computer.
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It’s all looking good, Suzanne!
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keep up the good work Suzanne
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I wonder how Suzanne does it all!! I know that 52 helps as much as he possibly can (when he’s not at work), but there is still so very much to do.
I get tired just thinking of all the work that they do around the farm.
And then Suzanne also worries about us, her blog devotees.
Thank you, Suzanne.
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Speaking of manly men and knitting, how about well-known football player and needlepointer Rosey Grier?
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Don’t work too hard. We will still be here.
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