Welcome to the NEW Roz Wound Up

Welcome to the new location and look of Roz Wound Up. Please mark this URL as a favorite so you can come back often.

I’ve wanted to combine my blog, website, and class information into one site for several years now. This summer, after my website got hacked, I started what has been a rather involved process.

In the past month things have started to come together. Not everything is in place yet, so please excuse the mess. But last week I was able to move the final posts from my Typepad site over—it’s time to start blogging on this site.

What’s New About the Site?

1. The new design is dynamic. It will be more readable on your phone or tablets.

2. There are many more moving parts and ways to get around and find content. Of course there is still a blog-specific search engine. This appears in a couple places on various page layouts. Look at the top of the page and you’ll find it.

3. At the bottom of each page you’ll find the footer contains a subscribe feature! Please take a moment to subscribe. The old lists aren’t going to be transferred. This new feature is going to allow me to send you news about posts so you know when to visit. Also, in ways I haven’t researched yet it will allow me to send out newsletters that have additional content. You know I love newsletters! I appreciate your readership—this is a way for us to keep in touch.

4. On the HOME page you’ll find a horizontal feature that contains images and blog post titles just below the navigation bar. (You can see a portion of this in the top portion of the image at the left.) Click on either end of that string of images and it will scroll over to new items. Click on any item and it will bring up materials that are of interest in those categories. (I haven’t quite worked out how to keep this cycling through all the posts I have yet, but I think this will be clear to me when I’ve reorganized my categories.)

5. Just below that string of posts you’ll find a grid containing a large central image surrounded by others. (See the bottom portion of the image at the left.) That central image, here, a contour sketch of Dick, is the most recent post, and the images surrounding it are the next most recent. You can always come here and see at a glance what’s been added.

6. The next features are all posts pulled together because they come from a common category—which is listed at the top. I’ll be fiddling around with these in the next few months to explore ways to expose you to more opportunities to read posts.

7. My old website—Rozworks.com—has been moved, along with the blog. It’s massive and full of images, and it won’t undergo a design change. But it was brought along so that I could keep my links. I love to cross reference. And I love to send you to my journal archives from that website. So of course I wanted it here. Soon you’ll be able to go directly to sections of it by clicking on things in the navigation bar—under “Book Arts” you will eventually find my journal archives and bookbinding galleries. Under “Visual Journaling” you’ll be able to access my Daily Dots. That’s all coming, along with a direct link to my YouTube Channel so you can explore there as well.

8. My former site’s “pages feature” that told you things like how to tear down Fabriano Artistico Watercolor paper, gave you links to my favorite gouache and color theory posts, or told you where to find a life-drawing co-op in the Twin Cities will be moved to be under “Essentials” in the Navigation bar at the top of the page. It’s not working right now—it burps out the 3 same posts. But it’s essential I get this working for me, as much as for you, because these posts are what I get asked about most and I need to be able to reference them too. Speaking of which…

A Few Things That Aren’t Polished Yet

1. I’m still not used to the formatting on the new site. You’ll see some gutters between images and text that are too wide. I’m looking at how to fix that. (Believe me it bothers me more than it does you.) I haven’t even finished the opening “gull” graphic!

2. Any of the posts brought over from the original Typepad.RozWoundUp.Com blog (which is over 2,100 posts) all have captions that tell you to click on the image to view an enlargement. Right now the whole post appears in a new window. That’s still being fixed. I’m just amazed that the web designer was able to bring all those posts over in a manner that worked smoothly otherwise. (Posts created on this new site won’t have this problem. I still hope to have the other fixed as well.)

3. The tags list seems problematic. It’s too unwieldy and I’m not found of rectangles with rounded edges. The web designer is working to find some options.

If you’re a regular reader you know I love to use tags and create categories. The web designer sat me down and explained tags and categories to me and set me to creating parent-child relationships among categories so that things could be grouped usefully together. Then he sad me down and explained it again. I think it finally took. I’m in the process of working all that out right now. (But I really wanted to start blogging again, so that’s why I’m not working on it right now.) Before too long searching using the category will be more streamline. (Click on the image at the left to see an enlargement and the location of the “Categories.”

For now, to search the many categories on Roz Wound Up (RWU) please go to any blog post and at the top of the post, on the right, under the search engine you’ll find a pull-down category list. These are all the categories you use to find on RWU.

4. The navigation bar at the top of the blog page that gives you direction to Home, Book Arts, Sketching…Classes, etc. Isn’t usefully subdivided yet.

5. I haven’t written the About Roz page yet! You’re here, you know me. I’d rather push on the other points and get back to blogging. But I will get to it.

6. I had to manually move all posts from January 15, 2017 to February 17, 2017 to the new blog (the big blog post dump had already happened. This mean that I lost all the comments for those posts, and they now all appear published on the same day. But the good news is the information is here and accessible.

7. I’ve asked for an additional way to navigate through posts (previous and next) besides using the thin photo bar scroll at the top of the blog page.

8. On some of the transferred blog posts you’ll see “ ” under the post’s title. This is an artifact from the transfer process. I’m hoping there is an easy fix, but if there isn’t, well maybe I’ll go and delete them one at a time, one a day for years! Who knows. Just be aware I know it’s there and annoys me too.

9. Cross-references on the new RWU site go back to posts on the old site at this point. I’m still hoping for a fix for that as well.

What About The Former Site and Links You Might Have Saved To It?

Let’s say you’re a dedicated reader of Roz Wound Up and you’ve bookmarked several posts from the Typepad blog. Is the Typepad blog going to disappear right away?

No, it will still be there for awhile as the web designer and I work out that things are how they need to be here at the new site.

The bad news is that the former site will eventually be phased out, probably at the end of the year.

I recommend that you look at your bookmarked pages and write down the publish date and title. Then come over here to the new RWU and enter the title into the search engine. The first few words should work. The search engine will bring up a list of posts and you can find your favorite again, and bookmark it. Once the former site is decommissioned it’s the only way, besides a broader and less satisfying Goggle search, that you’ll be able to find your way back to the the posts.

What I’m Excited About

First, I’m excited that you’ve followed me here. Next I’m excited about the change because the new code for this new site is exactly that—new code. Things have to always be updated and changed in the digital age so it was time to get this done.

The change has brought a more readable interface for you to view.

It also provides some new functionality that I look forward to using going forward.

Most of all it has allowed me to preserve all the information that I have created since 2008 when I began blogging about my creative process, my suggestions for bringing drawing into your life, my media experiments, and of course my many enthusiasms from dogs and birds and bicycling to movies and what’s up with Dick’s eyebrows. So many of you have written to tell me that these posts have mattered to you. That’s important to me going forward.

So thank you for your patience while I work with the web designer to go forward and make this a useful place for you to stop each day.

Let’s get out our sketchbooks and draw!

(Oh, and the comments will be open as soon as the web designer returns from a trip. I’ve poked around and can’t see how to handle that easily.)