Category Archives: Blog Blather

Bl*gger Behaving Badly

Posted on December 5, 2007 | 6 comments

Okay, so I wrote a little rant about how Bl*gger is ticking me off, what with its changes stopping (non-Bl*gger) bloggers from linking our URL to our comments (not 100% true – hyperlinks can still be included in the body of the comment, it does get a little tiresome typing/cut-n-pasting the html in though).

However. I’ve done a little digging and it seems this might just be a part of the Bl*gger shift to supporting OpenID. Which is, apparently, A Good Thing. I just wonder why Google/Bl*gger made this annoying little change over to the next-to-useless ‘Nickname’ field instead of leaving us with the option of including our (non-Bl*gger) URL in the ‘Other’ section. Really. They’re just pissing people off. The assumption many bloggers seem to be making at the moment is that Google/Bl*gger are trying to coerce everyone into having an account with them (which is possibly also true, I grant you).

I have found many a new and interesting blog through following links in the comment section of other blogs. I’ve been ‘found’ by other readers in the same way. This latest development is just plain irritating, and (cue my very best Pauline Hanson voice)… I don’t like it!

Must go and check out OpenID some more though. Sounds useful.

Then I have to go finish beating Dermot at Scrabble (a rare occurrence) and sew together eleventy-million pre-schoolers’ Christmas stockings. There will be glitter all over this place for months!

Edit: Here’s some of the discussion re. Bl*gger and OpenID, at http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites, http://www.notsorelevant.com, http://mashable.com and http://googlesystem.blogspot.com

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Posted in Blog Blather, General Ramblings

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Lucky 1000

Posted on November 1, 2007 | 2 comments

Way back in August, I announced I’d be sending a little ‘thankyou’ package to the person who made the 1000th comment on Million Stitches. Perhaps I was a little premature in my announcement – posting and commenting has been a wee bit slow since! It took us three months, but we finally got there. And the lucky commenter is….dum dum dum daaaaa…. Jenna! Hooray, one of my favourite people 😆 I’ll be popping your goodies into the mail in the next week or so Jenna. Thank you everyone who has dropped in and left a comment or thirty over my two years as a blogger – I very much appreciate you all 😳

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Oops

Posted on October 10, 2007 | 1 comment

Ahem. Sorry about the unscheduled broken-time. A stupid mistake – I was upgrading my WordPress installation and then went to bed without actually testing it properly, and hey, turns out I missed that teeny tiny .htaccess file that makes it all work. So Million Stitches was broken good and proper this last 24 hours. Never mind. We’re back in business now. And I have part two of the Smalls Exchange to show you. Here are the pretties which Christine stitched for me – an Ellen Maurer Stroh biscornu (beautiful beaded edge Christine 🙂 ) and fob:

sm-exchange

Aren’t they gorgeous? You can see more images on Christine’s post, including a photograph of the extra goodies she sent me – a lovely handmade card, highlighters (staple of any stitcher’s toolkit!), doggie post-its which Finn very much fancies for himself, and the very beautiful Drawn Thread Cloister Garden kit. This is me on opening my gifties: 😆

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Posted in Blog Blather, Counted Stitchwork, Finished

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Now You See Me

Posted on October 4, 2007 | 3 comments

Okay, if you’re seeing this, you’re on the new server and everything is hunky-dory. Comment away 🙂

Oh, and PS. We’re away tomorrow on a long weekend’s break, so if everything isn’t hunky-dory, then too darn bad. I’ll be in the spa!

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Inspiration, Celebration

Posted on August 2, 2007 | 7 comments

Well lookie here. My wee biscornus got a little spot on the Focus on Finishing blog. Thanks Karen! Glad I could provide some inspiration – I’ve been feeling a little short of that myself lately.

In order to try getting myself inspired to stitch again, I’ve been going through my stash and weeding out some of what I don’t need. I’m not fully organised yet, but I’ve been doing some ebaying and Freecycling, and in the next couple of days, I’ll post a few more things I have for sale but can’t be bothered ebaying up on the blog, so keep your eyes out.

While looking back into my archives for the details on the car story, I realised that in May this year, I missed the second anniversary of my blog’s birth. So, uh, Happy 2-years-2-months-and-a-bit Blogiversary to me! Since I missed that celebration, I’m going to celebrate the 1000th comment on this blog instead. I’m going to start putting together a little something for the person who leaves the 1000th comment on Million Stitches… but I’m not going to tell you how close we are to that milestone yet! I assure you, it’s at least a handful of posts away, and given my recent post frequency, it could take some time to get there. Or not. We shall see :giggle:

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Posted in Blog Blather, Counted Stitchwork, General Ramblings

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Oops

Posted on January 11, 2007 | 4 comments

Thanks for the heads-up, Christine 🙂

Sorry people, I was (obviously) fiddling with the look and widgets on the blog, and something was not quite right. If you access the blog via RSS you should have had no problems, but it was a wee bit broken for the rest of you (and me – I couldn’t even access the admin panel this morning). Should be okay now, please let me know if it isn’t.

This look is (hopefully) a temporary stopping point. I was weary of the old theme, but have no-time to finish working on my own (it does have a tantalising title though – ‘Floss Garden’ 🙂 ). So I thought this was a nice fresh, simple theme to adopt in the meanwhile.

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Snippets and an SBQ

Posted on November 2, 2006 | 1 comment

I finally finished the last of my marking yesterday. I think I had just about got into the swing of it, but still, I don’t harbour any desire to do it again.

I spent much of yesterday trying to decide whether to sign up for NaBloPoMo after all. In the end, I went to bed early instead, thus missing the signup deadline, and I’m probably glad of that. Also glad of the extra couple of hours of sleep, as Niamh woke up three times again.

In a case of “don’t count your chickens” (re. the camera purchase), my tax return arrived today, and somebody at the ATO has monumentally stuffed up, doing me out of a very substantial amount of family tax benefit. I spent an hour and a half on the phone and down at Medicare today trying to sort it out. We will get the money, but it may take another month. Grrr.

I’ve signed up for another exchange even when I told myself I wouldn’t. Hardanger. Scary.

Christmas is how close? 😮 And I’ve realised that I have to make Niamh a Santa Sack. Like this one of Finn’s. It’s an Ellen Maurer Stroh free design – I think I’ll use the reindeer design for Niamh.

SBQ from today:

How did you decide on the title of your stitching blog? Was it random, or does it have a special meaning to you or about you?

Erm… I think I was kind of trying to be clever. Or something. Something about “The journey of a million stitches begins with a single cross”. Let’s call it random, anyway. I’ve been considering renaming to “Stitched By Mel” to match the url, but I’m still not sure about that. I feel like this blog is less and less about stitching at the moment, so I’m not sure either the name or the address are particularly appropriate. I have therefore also considered moving the whole blog to a new subdomain and renaming it Blogged.byMel. But I’m somewhat loathe to change the address. I suspect everything will just stay the same… I’m a great procrastinator :giggle:

Edit: Clearly, this entry was written back when the name of the blog was ‘Million Stitches’, and clearly, I eventually moved and renamed the blog 🙂

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Posted in Blog Blather, Counted Stitchwork, Memes

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Happy 31st October

Posted on October 31, 2006 | 2 comments

Happy Halloween, to the Northern-hemisphericans dropping by 🙂 Happy Beltane to those downunder who celebrate the old ways. And… um… Happy Tuesday to the rest of you?

In this household, it seems more like Christmas. Our tax return is through (well, half of it anyway). Usually this time of year means paying off debts – last year we paid off our car and a hefty credit card debt. Thanks in part to the baby bonus and in part to some gruelling overtime hours put in by OtherHalf, we’re reasonably okay on the debt front this year. Apart from the house, that is.

So today, we welcomed this new baby into the house. Isn’t she beautiful? Mmmm… digital SLR goodness. This is a purchase we’ve been planning to make for some time – my (film) SLR camera gave up the ghost recently, and we’ve been meaning to replace our (compact) digital camera with something better, so this is the ‘something better’ we came up with. We (OtherHalf) found a wonderful deal on the body plus two (two!) lenses and a 1GB SD memory card. Part of the attraction of the Nikon is that the remaining film SLR camera in the household is also a Nikon, and the telephoto lens we got with the D50 is fully compatible with both Nikons. Yay! Expect more beautiful photos in my future.

And with that… ‘Blogtober’ is over! I now return you to your regularly scheduled spasmodic blogging. Just kidding. I’m hoping that with my marking commitments behind me, and with Niamh starting to sleep a little better (okay, that’s wishful thinking, I admit) I’ll be stitching and crafting (and photographing finished products) a bit more frequently, so I’ll try and be here a little more as well.

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Posted in Blog Blather, General Ramblings

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NaBloPoMo

Posted on October 29, 2006 | 1 comment

Just when I’m drawing close to the end of my self imposed ‘Blogtober‘ challenge, I’ve stumbled across NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month, which is the bloggers’ alternative to NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Dreamed up by this blogger, the idea is simply to post on your blog every single day of November. There are prizes and all! There are also rules about not cheating by altering timestamps, so you know I’d do badly :giggle: Anyway, I’m 100% certain I wouldn’t manage another month of writing every day, so I won’t be signing up. But there are loads of interesting bloggers participating (scroll down this page), so it might be fun to follow along. Let me know if any of you decide to join in 🙂

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Stream of (Un)consciousness

Posted on October 18, 2006 | 2 comments

I don’t really know how much I like the new Mirabilia mermaid. I’ll happily wait until seeing some WIPs before I decide completely, but she seems kind of… shapeless, to me. The colours and swirly bits look nice, I guess.

Anyway, it’s not like I need another addition to my wishlist! More stashy mail arrived yesterday – I was completely unable to resist the lure of a 60% off closing down sale at Stitched from the Heart. Along with some Antique White Quaker and Cashel to add to my dyeing stash, I picked up Teenie Tweenies Vintage Grapes and Baby bluebells fob and The Drawn Thread Autumn Arbor. I’m thinking it might be time for another trip to the Wagon soon 😳

I’ve truncated my blog feeds. Just in case you were wondering. You probably weren’t. It’s related to the Bitacle saga, reading about which has taken up too much of my evening. I have yet to make further moves to block Bitacle from my content, but I’m too tired to think about it right now.

And on a related note, I’m definitely now switching from my current feed reader (Sage) to Google Reader. I tried Google Reader only a couple of weeks ago, and wasn’t that happy with the interface, and it seemed a little buggy (not picking up updates from all my subscribed feeds, for example). But I had another look tonight, and it seems they’ve had a nice little makeover, which makes me happy.

That is all 🙂

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Posted in Blog Blather, Counted Stitchwork, General Ramblings

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