Ode to Barbara

If you're a Do Not Leave Unattended! participant, you hopefully received my e-mail last weekend about the new blog design for the project being up and running. If you're not on that mailing list, please take a minute to go here and check it out, along with all the incredible contributions that have come in since the project launch in August.


Thinking of the new design, I wanted to (and have been dilatory in doing so) take a minute to send a huge thank you to Barbara of Candy Hearts and Paper Flowers, the developer extraordinaire responsible for all the technical details of the new blog. I have thanked her multiple times for all her help, but wanted to let everyone in our community here know just how amazing and incredibly helpful she has been. I literally could not have done this without her.

I've had a few technical issues with Run4istRun since the launch of the new design, most of which have probably gone unnoticed by most of you unless you're a Mac user who at times wasn't able to comment. That was just one of the issues, including those related to publishing due to an outstanding bug still not fixed by Blogger. Something which has also recently crept up is the blog being designated as spam, and although I've e-mailed the folks at Blogger multiple times to request a review, so they can confirm a real person is posting here, I'm going on almost three weeks now of having to use word verification every single time I save anything I've typed, or click the publish button (I guess it's actually kind of good I haven't had a lot of extra time for blogging lately!). It's completely annoying, to say the least.

Without going in to all the details, to really fix the problems once and for all the template needs to be rewritten from scratch. Because of all the custom work Ari did when setting up the design, this will be a big project and unfortunately one that will be beyond my technical abilities. When I learned this, especially after all the work that had already been done to set up the new design, I was completely disheartened and honestly gave serious consideration to scrapping the blog altogether (I really was that frustrated). After thinking on it for a couple of days I thought of Barbara, whom I'd previously met here on the blog and with whom I'd exchanged several e-mails, remembering she works in the technology field and also that she'd set up the code for Erin's Mankind Mag widget. I e-mailed her to see if she might be able to help with some of the immediate issues and Hallelujah! She rode in on her virtual white horse and saved the day.

The design work for Unattended! was in process around this time, and Barbara jumped in with her expertise to take all the graphics and get them set up on the new platform. She took care of everything, and without me even asking added little features here and there to make it better. I really cannot thank her enough, but hope this will help to show her how very grateful I am, and always will be, for all she's done. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Big thanks also go to Ari for her work on the design (which I'm completely loving), as well as to Krissy, who shared her talent by adding some of her own touches to the project logo (by the way, she let me take a sneak peek of the holiday cards soon to be available in her Etsy store and I can confirm they are amazing!).

I've met some really great people here in this corner of the blogosphere, which is one of the original reasons why I wanted to start something collaborative with the notebook project. While it's not visible to everyone who visits, from my perspective nowhere is that generous sense of collaboration more apparent than in the Unattended! blog, which came together, and will continue to evolve, from the efforts of everyone involved. Thanks to each and every one of you (and one more big thank you to Barbara)!

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