For those of you who read Offbeat Mama via RSS (which includes those of you who follow on Facebook or LiveJournal), you'll notice a change in the the way posts appear. Longer posts are now clipped, with a link to click through to read the full post here on the site. It's the same as the way longer posts appear on the homepage — you get a teaser on the homepage, and then a link to continue reading and then comment. Shorter posts will appear in full.

This was a change I thought a lot about — I do all my blog reading via RSS, and I know what a pain truncated feeds can be. But over the last few months I've notice that, with full posts showing up all over the web, discussion was getting super dispersed. For many posts, there are multiple conversations happening in parallel — the comments here on the site, comments on Facebook, and then sometimes comments on LiveJournal!

Ultimately, this here website is my focus — I'm not running a Facebook page or a LiveJournal community. My hope is that by clipping syndicated posts, conversations can flow a bit better and stay on the site. I realize this may not be a popular decision — I'd ask y'all to give it a shot for couple weeks and let's see how it goes.

So, Andreas and I are likely having a baby this afternoon…

Continue reading "Offbeat maternity leave" →

Who says the last month has to be about tent-shirts and sweatpants?

At 8.5 months pregnant, Dominianne is fully rocking her hand-crafted Steampunk maternity wear. For another couple shots of this amazing outfit, keep reading!

Continue reading "Steampunk maternity fashion" →

So, two bits of administrative news to share with y'all:

• First, Erika's decided to step back from editing Offbeat Mama. She did amazing work this fall helping me get things up and running, and I encourage y'all to follow along with her ongoing adventures over at Parsing Nonsense.
• Second, I was one of 800 people laid off from Microsoft this week. Without getting into details, everything works out great logistically (yay for severance!) with an added bonus of me having more time to dedicate to developing Offbeat Mama.

This is all to say, you'll be seeing lots more of me around Offbeat Mama in coming weeks. To be clear: Offbeat Mama will never be my personal blog, and I'll still be featuring lots of guest posts from y'all! I'll just be a bit more hands-on with editing and writing on the site now.

So, uh, yeeeeah. You know how I've been making websites since 1996? And how I'm a total nerd?

…This morning I have lost some of my nerd cred.

Turns out that any emails y'all may have sent us through this page have been disappearing into the ether due to a mistake I made … a month ago. We've been getting y'all's guestpost submissions — thank goodness I didn't screw that up! But if you've emailed us with a tip or a hello or anything else … we didn't get your message.
Try again?