If you’ve been visiting this site for longer than the past two weeks, you’ve likely noticed the changes we’ve made to the overall format. Due to a handful of responses from folks other than our grandparents (hi Grandma & Grandpa!) who read our site, we figured we could make it a little more friendly for the world at large. And so the gears of construction began to grind…

Now let it be known that we by no means consider ourselves to be experts in the field of web page construction. As Savvy as Husband is, he has dealt in very little other than to produce an html grid-based calendar for his high school’s sporting events. As Lovely as Wife is, she has even fewer programming skills, although her keen eye for design has transferred well to layouts and graphics. Alas, as Darling as Daughter is, internet-wise she is good for little other than content and a photo subject. To round the family out, Princess Pup doesn’t even have opposable thumbs, so you can guess how much help she is. With that in mind, Lovely Wife figured we had at least one leg-up on a bunch of other blogs we follow. Savvy Husband was less than confident in her conclusion and found himself dragging his feet supporting her whole-heartedly.

And so the revamp began. There have been a handful of projects we’ve tackled throughout our marriage, and it seems that often the skills required push the boundaries of one or both of our capabilities. Now, I’m all for “personal growth”, but when you’ve got your significant other criticizing your every move watching over your shoulder, it can be enough to stress even the deepest relationships. This undertaking was different though – I don’t know if it was the result of a few years of working through projects together, if this particular project was better suited to our talents, or likely a combination of both; but it came together very quickly. Some of the changes are fairly straightforward and visible, but for our non-tech audience (hi Grandma & Grandpa!) we’ll give a brief summary of what we’ve done. Some of the changes are much more subtle, but we figured we should be upfront about them with the folks who so kindly visit the site. In no particular order:

• “Subscribe with…” those snappy polaroid-looking icons on the right hand side of the page. The icons are commonly referred to as ‘chicklets’ due to their similar shape and size when compared to the popular gum. You may have seen them on other sites and they do identical things – Lovely Wife just spruced them up to suit her style. There’s “RSS” and “Feedburner” which will allow you to subscribe to our “feed”. If you don’t know what that is, we only recently discovered it ourselves and you can learn more about it by watching this popular short video called “RSS In Plain English”. In a nutshell, it will allow you to be notified when we post something instead of you checking back day after day (hi Grandma & Grandpa!). If you don’t want to bother with that, there’s straight up e-mail which will send a message to your inbox each time we update. Finally, there’s a Facebook link that will redirect you to the Facebook page for this site – ‘Like’ it or even subscribe to a feed from there! If one of those four don’t float your boat, there’s the messy stack of additional photos that you can click on and search through ALL of the options out there that’ll let you know when we have posted something new.
• “Share & Save” with the stack of polaroids at the bottom of the page. If you particularly enjoyed a post and would like to pass it onto others in your social circle, this little widget will let you do it! You’ll first need to sign into your respective social network (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and a link to the post you just read will be entered for you! It’s a great way to spread the word and keep track of some of your favorite posts.
• Google Analytics. Big Brother Google is watching. Not that it should surprise you, but they are – and in fact, they’re particularly good at it. This is a behind-the-scenes feature that we’ve installed that will let us know how many folks are visiting the pages and which posts are being visited the most. For example, we know that on average, two people visited our site every day in the past week (hi Grandma & Grandpa!). We won’t bore you with more details that you’re capable of looking up on your own, but we can tell you that what it does not do is record your name or precise location, steal your credit cards and social security numbers, make your children more vulnerable to predators, or go back in time to make sure your parents never met thereby wiping out your very existence. Collecting metrics like these is supposed to help us better suit our site in order to work the following business model:
       1) Remodel Site
       2) Use Google Analytics
       3) ?
       4) Profit!*
  In all seriousness, we’re curious as to how many people are out there who are stalking us reading our blog. And, as a bonus, we can tell what kind of internet browser you’re using.
• Google Searchable. We couldn’t really decide whether this one should make the list, but we needed one more bullet point figured we’d include it for your benefit. All this means is we’ve made the site searchable with popular search engines. Beforehand, you only could find it via our posts on Facebook or word-of-mouth. If someone in Tanzania got a wild hair to Google-search “Savvy Husband”, this site wouldn’t show up in their results. Now, when a Siberian stranger sits down to Google and executes the same search, our site is number 7,694 on their list! Hooray for publicity! On a side note, if you’re now concerned that a picture or story about you is available to the world at large, please contact us and we’ll be happy to remove or amend it in someway.
• Facebook Comments. Finally, you will find a field that may be familiar to many of you (even Grandma & Grandpa!) at the bottom of each post. That’s right, we’ve managed to rig some code to get Facebook comments enabled. If you are signed in at the time and hit the “Like” button at the bottom, a link to it will show up on your wall. If you comment, you will be asked to re-type some squiggly letters to make sure you’re a real person, then you’ll have the option of posting the comment to your wall along with the link to the post you commented on. If you are not signed in to Facebook, you’ll have to first sign in – if you want to leave a comment and you don’t have a Facebook profile, it’s time to join the 21st century you can still comment in the section below using your email address.

So therein lies most of the important changes to the site. Feel free to make suggestions if you have them, and please report any bugs if you come across them. Don’t be surprised if you stumble across a new widget or some new comment styles in the future. We may cover more of these in an FAQ section at some point, but that hasn’t been created just yet. In the meantime, we hope Grandma & Grandpa all our readers enjoy our work in progress!

*Yes, I stole this business model directly from the Underpants Gnomes of South Park.

I always dislike explaining my job because it’s so much more then anything I can explain in a few minutes. For our program, I helped put together an application for some award AND WE WON! Because of that, someone who explains things for a living wrote an article about our program: What does Lovely Wife do exactly?