A new pattern and website geekiness

Challenge Day 11

Today\’s pattern is a nice one for Thanksgiving.  It\’s not the one I was gushing about the other day because I haven\’t had a chance to scan it in yet.  I spent all last evening working on website behind the scenes stuff.  But more on that in a minute.

Here is a picture of the pattern I just added to the website:

It\’s the profile of a turkey, in case you can\’t figure it out.  I like it because his tail feathers are spread out and it reminds me of the wild turkeys that I see wandering around not too far from my house.  I first spotted this group (flock?) of turkeys a couple of years ago.  There are about six or seven of them and you can find them in a few different locations within about a mile radius.  I\’m assuming it\’s the same group of birds.  But often one of them, the male I guess, will walk around with his tail feathers spread out in all their glory.  It really is something to see.  What\’s more amazing is that I live in a very suburban area.  We do have some old farmland around and apple orchards, but central Connecticut has a pretty dense population.  These birds will just hang around on someone\’s front lawn, with all these cars whizzing by.

As with all the other patterns, it\’s available for purchase for $1.49 and can be found on the \”New\” page.

As I mentioned before, I spent much of last night working to fix up some problems with the website.  Specifically, some problems related to downloading the patterns.  If you\’re easily bored by tech talk, you may want to skip the rest of this post.  But if you\’ve encountered problems while trying to download my patterns, or if you are interested how things work, then read on.  I will try to keep it brief.

I had purchased a software program in March to handle the automatic downloading of the patterns.  It\’s actually a great program except it had a little glitch that would sometimes corrupt .pdf files when people tried to download them.  After a few months of fighting with it and lots of emails from frustrated customers, I had to zip up all the files.  So, if you made a purchase from June til now, you downloaded a zipped file.  Not too bad except sometimes people had trouble unzipping them.  But at least I got a lot fewer emails asking for help.

Finally, after months and months, the software developer released an update to the program to fix the glitch.  I had to spend quite a bit of time last night updating the files because of course it wasn\’t as simple as just copying in the new files he provided, because I had customized the download area to match my website.

I have not yet switched all the files back to .pdf format because I have a lot of pattern files and I\’m worried that it won\’t work, so I only switched the new patterns that I\’ve added in the last week.  If I start getting emails complaining about error messages again, I\’m going to have to switch back to the zipped files again.  But this patch has been out for a month or so and I\’ve been on the support forums and it looks like it should work.

The other issue was the password problems.  Everyone will be happy to know that now there is an option to click on a link and your username and password will automatically be filled into the form for you so there shouldn\’t be anymore password problems.  I know that password issues was a big source of frustration for a lot of people.  This should basically eliminate all problems with inputting the password.

Well, I think that\’s enough geekiness for now.  I need to get back to knitting since last night was spent working on the computer.  I just thought some of you might like to know about some of what it takes to keep the website going.