Osborn Fiber Studio

Change is in the air, my friends. I mean, like, literal changes, on this blog you are reading right now. A lot of things have been in the works for a while, but they are finally to the point that you might experience some changes – both pleasant and unpleasant – so this is your initial heads-up.

The first change is (mostly) in response to the issue many of you have noticed with the site: namely the site being down frequently. I’ve noticed this chiefly during after-dinner peak times (evening blogging has been out), but y’all have told me that you’ve had issues at other times too. I’ve tried working with our hosting service on this, and their solutions haven’t helped.

I am hoping that changing our hosting service (to a fancier one that is associated with my website software) will help this. I am going to take the plunge on that sometime this week. Because it involves essentially moving the place where my website lives to a different computer box somewhere out in the real world, I don’t know how involved that process will be or how much down time you will experience. But I am sure that momentary discomfort will be nothing to the repeated annoyance of my page not loading at all. I don’t know for sure that this will fix it, but I will depend on your feedback to let me know.

A second problem I’ve been experiencing is increased spam. My spam blocker is pretty good, but spambots seem to get smarter, and I’m getting dozens of spam comments through every week. Mercifully, the spambots don’t seem to be smart enough to post on any post that is recent, so chances are you haven’t seen them. I’m hoping switching hosts will help that a little, though another upgrade might be necessary for that. We’ll see.

Enough of the technical changes, now for the fun ones!

Third: you might have noticed that I haven’t dyed yarn in a really long time. My mom has taken over the dyeing side of our business, and soon, she will be splitting off into her own yarn business altogether: Storm Yarns! Storm Yarns’ website is nearing completion, and when that happens I’ll throw her a nice launch party from here, and a link to them will live on my website for at least a while, if not forever.

This means that you won’t be able to buy yarn through this site anymore. All Osborn Fiber Studio yarn will be rebranded – some of it discontinued, but more on that another day – as Storm Yarns, and available through their website. It also means that I’ll be taking down a lot of those pages and links from this site.

Fourth, more than just changing some widgets around, I have some long-term visual redesign on my heart for this website. My vision for my blog has evolved significantly, and I would like the design of the page to reflect that. I’ll start by just decluttering the sidebars, but I may experiment with some different themes and layouts as well. Ultimately I plan on ordering some artwork from my talented sister for a custom layout, if that isn’t a total pipedream. Anyway, you might experience periods of glitchy links, or different tools available. But the main blog content will always be readable, I expect. I’ll appreciate your feedback as I (and others) mess around with things, but remember that nothing is going to be final for a while.

Thanks for your patience as things have been breaky and in process. I’ll keep you updated as things actually go through. A lot changes as I move through life stages, but I know I want to keep writing. Thank you, as always, for reading.