winter

Are you rubbing your eyes and doing a double take? Is this worse than if I had kidnapped your mom? What if I told you that your mom came willingly and we’re at the outlet mall buying portable speakers and plaid scarves to put in your stocking and yes while I’m at it I’ll just go ahead and ruin your Christmas.

This website is long overdue for a facelift, and it’s a project we’ve been working on over here behind the scenes for some time. And by “some time” I mean infinity. More than that. I saw the other side of infinity and it’s a dark and lonely place worse than most stretches of I-55 that run through Mississippi. Worse because on the other side of infinity there’s no barbecue.

We’re going to be working out the kinks for a few days as there are inevitably kinks when you take on a project like this — migrating almost 12 years of blog posts to a totally different content management system — all in-house. Some features might not work initially for you, and if you’ve got technical questions we’d like to collect them all over in one helpful little bundle over in the community.

I welcome your feedback (please don’t bite), but want you to know first that my intention with this redesign is to make things easier to read and navigate. Everything has been optimized for speed and load times. I also wanted to open up the broad archive of material I have just sitting there being neglected like a middle child, thus the RELATED links at the end of each post.

Listen, I know you don’t neglect your middle child. He is thriving and mastering the clarinet. You’re doing a good job.

I also needed to shake things up a bit for my own well-being, kind of like the whole process of growing out my hair. I imagine the feedback to this redesign will be similar to the feedback I’ve received about my hair:

“Wow! How do you get your hair to grow so fast?!”

“Um, dooce? Have you ever heard of vitamins? Because I’ve never seen someone’s hair grow so slow.”

“You changed your hair?”

Before I fall over I wanted to make this note:

Facebook has presented some major technical difficulties in terms of extracting a comprehensive list of my subscribers, meaning we have yet to determine the winner of the first cash card in the 2012 Giving Thanks Giveaway. We’ve been looking into solutions to this problem since Thursday night and will update you the moment we get some answers. Thank you for your patience, and trust me. I have been shaking my fist indignantly at the computer screen on your behalf.