Two Bloggers Walk Into A Sidebar…: a house log

We interrupt our normal programming for a bit of journal business. We have updated our sidebar! Please, contain your excitement.

It is nothing major, but sufficient of you have had questions about the changes that we whipped up over Memorial Day weekend that we figured it warranted a swift explanation (and an apology to those who witnessed any funny business on Monday while we played around). One of my goals now that I am a full time blogger/father has been to improve some of the function of our site and clean up the design (within my limited coding skills). In fact it was even my resolution this year. So to that end, here are a few of the things that might look a bit distinct (unless you read us in a reader and have no clue what our sidebar even looks like):

Change #1: A Second Tabbed Window- We have condensed some of our sidebar content into another one of those handy-dandy tabbed windows like the search box that we have in the top right corner. You may be familiar with that one, and this additional box resides simply a bit lower and contains things like, um, our cheesy smiling mugs.

Truly it is simply a replacement for our old Contact button. But in the tabs behind it we have brought in things like a new “Shortcuts” window that contains straightforward links to some of the most frequently asked questions (where did you get that _______ in your house?) along with our most referenced how-to posts.

You will also see that we have moved our Link Enjoy section (i.e. our blogroll) up into this window so that you do not have to scroll as far down the page to access it anymore. And we even brought in a gooey little appreciation tab there on the end that we have called “Smooch” because we truly do enjoy you folks.

Change #2: New Buttons- Right under that new tabbed window, you will also see three new buttons (well, two of them are simply redesigned and one is in fact brandy new). You can still access Burger’s journal swiftly and hop over to a page for browsing all of our House Crashing posts, but now you can also find your way over to a Flickr album of Clara pictures. We figure it is an straightforward way for those of you who are hungry for a daily dose of baby to get your fix without flooding our post schedule with “is not she adorable” moments (which, if I may brag for a second, there are A LOT of lately).

Change #3: New Boxes: This last change is truly simply about cleaning up a bit of the design. I at last figured out / took the time to learn how to do something plain like add a clean white box around all of our sidebar widgets (like our Twitter feed, Discount-O-Rama listing, We are Digging items, etc) so everything simply looks a bit more consistent. Likely makes no difference to most of you, but it was a sweet sweet victory to me.

So that is the mini sidebar makeover. Hopefully you folks agree that the changes fall into the “improvement” category, but – as scary as this is to ask – please let us know if you’ve got other suggestions for us. We are glad to hear all ideas, but please understand upfront that not every suggestion is possible (even if only due to my limited coding abilities). Also – as scary as this is to ask as well – please let us know if something does not look quite right on your computer or if you think something is not showing up correctly in your browser. Thanks everyone! Now go click on that Smooch tab up near the Contact Us tab that we mentioned for some virtual enjoy from YHL to you.

UPDATE: Some of you are reporting trouble seeing the changes. The new buttons, like our sponsors’ ads, are coded using a flash advertising software. So if your browser is running some sort of flash or ad blocker (I am not talking pop-ups, homey do not play that here) it may be preventing you from seeing the Burger, Clara, or House Crashing buttons. If you can turn that off for simply YHL, that should solve the problem (thanks Barbara for figuring this out!) And no, this was not a clever ploy to make everyone view our ads – I simply used our ad software so that I could rotate a few versions of the buttons so you folks get served up a variety of Burger, Clara, and House Crashing thumbnails.