The new layout's here! (And yes, the new layout looks an awful lot like the old layout, which was what I wanted - I don't have time for a sitewide redesign right now.) While I still have a lot of tweaking to do, the blog is functional. And though I didn't appreciate being forced to do it (I find it difficult to believe that the almighty Google can't handle FTP service to their blog clients), I'm happy about some new additions I was able to make to the site. There are many features I've wanted to add but didn't have the time/ability to do it before but they're here now.

So here's what's new:

• The address of the blog. Not something I wanted to change, but had to. So please kindly point your links to blog.frenchtoastgirl.com.

• Related posts. This is something I've wanted to do for ages! Now at the bottom of each post, you'll see four links to other posts with an accompanying thumbnail for each. So on an Illustration Friday post, you'll see four others that also feature Illustration Friday entries, or a post about making homemade ice cream cake might have links to other recipes, watercolours, or family posts. I've been writing this blog for almost 9 years, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes up after each post because it has an element of randomness I rather like about it.

• Twitter feed. Tweet! These are the kind of things you'd be used to hearing about from me - links and thoughts about design, painting, art, family, music... I generally don't post about what I ate or if I'm going to the movies. :) Feel free to subscribe if you wish.

• Tag cloud. All the labels I use for tagging posts are arranged alphabetically to the side - you can now see what I write the most about (art, as it's the largest sized font) and how many posts I've written about paintings done with coffee (11).

• Expanded archives. Instead of clicking on the month and having to scroll down to look for a particular link on the left, you now can open the month in the sidebar, read all the post titles, and choose the one you want to read. Or you can still click and read the whole month if you like.

• Friendconnect. You can "follow" the blog - it's another way to get the feed and to know when I've posted something new. I'm still not really sure how this one works, but I'm willing to try it out.

Things I know are still wonky:

• The links to the rest of the site aren't showing up in IE. I'm trying to figure out a workaround to that, in the meantime, you can get there from here: frenchtoastgirl.com.

• My old comments are not synched up yet. I have to make a request to the service I use (it's not Blogger) and get them ported over, though new commenting should work just fine, so please feel free to say hi!

I'm looking forward to an evening not spent staring at code! Who knows, I might even.... paint!

This blog is now located at http://blog.frenchtoastgirl.com/. You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here. For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to http://blog.frenchtoastgirl.com/feeds/posts/default.

So here's what I've been doing: blogger's decided that they will no longer support FTP publishing, which is how I've done this blog for almost the past 9 years. So.... instead of painting? I'm coding, just to try to get the blog to stay mostly the same for now, because what I don't have time for right now is a site-wide redesign. And the address of the site has to change as well - so the blog will now be at blog.frenchtoastgirl.com, and it has to happen by May 1.

Sigh.

My son loves food, my daughters love amigurumi, and we all love to eat. What started out as a doodle turned into a coloring page. I can honestly say that not all kids eat all of these foods, but I would say they eat all but 3 (different for each kid... Peter's not fond of beets, Sophie doesn't do tomatoes, Angela won't touch mushrooms). And of course, all of them work well with (or in) dip in one form or another!

There is a precedent for faces on fruit at our house.... remember this?



That pear still cracks me up.