Scarlet Quince Ramblings

I was just outside to fill up the birdbath, feed the pond fish, etc. and it is incredibly hot. Nevertheless I need to go back out and do a little digging — I have some plants in pots to transplant and the bed where they are going needs to be bigger. But I’m going to wait until the sun is not actually shining right on me — it’s hot enough without that.

Instead, I’m hiding indoors doing a little tinkering on the web site. I just added this beautiful little angel to the gallery.  I got the picture in email a few days ago.  Somehow I always drag my feet on gallery updates — I don’t know why, and I’m trying to do better.  This is easily the most elaborate framing job I’ve ever seen – there are 3 mats and 2 frames.  Updating the gallery reminded me that I need to finish reorganizing the images on the site — there are really too many to be in one directory.  I’ve already moved the gallery images to their own place (and missed updating one of the gallery pages, now fixed).

I also realized that I need to update the printable order form to reflect the new postal rates — but more importantly, now that I understand that the postage is going to go up EVERY MAY FOREVER I need an easier way to do this (translation: time for a software project).  It’s really pretty tricky to come up with postage estimates based only on the price of the charts.  The idea is to have the estimate cover the actual postage, at least most of the time, without gypping people who use that order form.  Don’t you hate it when you order something that costs $5 and they charge you $12 for shipping when the actual postage is only $2?  Yeah, I know, they have to buy a box and they have to pay someone to put your thing into the box, but still.  That’s one of the things I like about having my own business — I am not stuck implementing someone else’s loathsome corporate policies.

One other point as long as I’m blathering about the web site — I am not sure the RSS stuff for this blog works.  Probably not.  I’ve put Michael in charge of figuring out what needs to be done to make it work and then telling me the absolute minimum so that I can implement it.  All I know is, I have an iGoogle page and it has a bunch of stuff on it and sometimes the stuff changes and it has something to do with RSS.  If you detect a bad attitude here, you’re right.  Some things are fun to learn about and some aren’t and I’m betting this falls into the second category.  I could be wrong.