Catching Up
It's been way too long since I last posted. I've been busy behind the scenes doing some massive (and long-overdue) blog clean-up.
I also had a few other big projects going on the side...and one of them lays eggs...
Thar Be Chickens
Ever since we bought this house 7 years ago, we've planned on turning the spare shed into a chicken coop.
It was one of those projects that just got put off too many times. This year I was determined at least something built to hold chickens!
So, while my husband was getting his garden ready, I semi-casually mentioned that chickens would be a great source of cheap fertilizer...
And now we have a coop. It took us a week to build it, and it is far from being pretty-but we used scrap lumber and fence panels we had on hand. The total cost of 256 square feet of chicken "palace" was...
$7.00 (for the latches and hinges!)
I posted on Facebook today that I was looking for some "mutt" chickens, and by this evening I had five non-mutt hens for an excellent price, (and some freebies coming tomorrow!)
I mentioned in this post on rural side-hustles that chickens were my first entrepreneurial endeavor as a teenager.
They've definitely been something I've missed every since my family moved away from farming.
Cartooning
I had this (crazy) idea to illustrate a tornado safety guide using funny cartoons. I try to write something weather related each spring for severe weather/tornado awareness.
This year I thought it would be more fun to illustrate it.
And it took forever!
I couldn't get it to format correctly as a blog post, so I made a stand-alone page. Still not perfect. Grr.
You can find it here:
"The Illustrated Guide to Tornado Safety"
It was going to have at least 5 more panels, but I really wanted it done for the severe storm season opening here in OK.
And finally:
Blog Clean Up
I was digging around and discovered that most of my links on the blog and Pinterest were not working correctly.
The way I originally had this site set up, with different feeds for different topics (which is kinda what you have to do with Weebly to have category feeds) was a MESS.
There were posts I couldn't find, more I couldn't access, and bad links everywhere for no good reason that I could see.
So, I moved everything to the blog feed. I don't know how that works on other sites, but with Weebly it means you have to assemble a new post for each old article and completely rebuild them all one at a time.
It was very time consuming, because you can't access posts from a list in editor mode. You have to scroll all the way through each feed to find each post.
The bad news is that of course it wreaked havoc with my pageviews this month. I will have to work extra hard to build that all back up. Plus, I had to go change all of the links on my pins. :(
On the bright side, I was able to edit each post one at a time without missing any. I still have some work to do, but I've got all the urgent care stuff out of the way, and my views are slowly creeping back up.
Whew. I'm hoping that improves my views and performance since I got rid of a lot of extra images, and the links all work.
I also created a fancy archive section for my categories. It took a lot of work but I think it looks soooo much more interesting than a plan link list.
What's Else March?
In between projects I'm watching March Madness. My team is still in so YAY!
I made my first sale on Redbubble! Someone bought this cartoon on a sticker.
My husband and I had our 7th anniversary on March 17th.
It's time to start getting my flower beds ready.
This post I wrote last year about Endometriosis Awareness has gotten almost 9000 views this month on Pinterest! It's now my second most popular pin after my post on twin pregnancy truths.
I really need to plan on some house spring cleaning too. But darn it, spring fever make us all want to be outside right now!