The thing is, our blog is geared towards DIY, and while changes to the blog may not be exactly a home improvement related item, our blog is definitely DIY. I've mentioned this before, but we don't run our blog on a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger, but instead a 100% custom programmed blogging platform that I built in ASP.NET a few years ago. (When I say I'm in IT, my background and interests lie in website and web application development.) So in the scope of our DIY geared website, this blog is about as DIY as most DIY blogs come.

Back when I built the blog I thought about things related to web development much differently. This was in about 2010 and the JavaScript revolution and mobile friendly responsive web design wave hadn't yet swept the world. In general, the blogging platform was decent, sufficient, and did the job it was meant to do, but it didn't do it in a particular graceful way. Our previous incarnation of the blog was bloated when it came to HTML and "page weight" (amount of data that had to be downloaded on each page load), slow, clunky, inefficient, error prone, and left a lot to be desired when it came to general usability. Without getting overly technical, our blog was the beater you see driving down the highway.

This month our blog will turn three years old, and late last year I figured it was high time to take a good hard look at our blog to figure out what could be improved or overhauled to better serve our needs and the needs of our readers. We'd had our slow and old blogging engine for long enough, and it was time I put in some effort to get with the times.

So what did we do besides essentially leave the whole old look and feel entirely intact? Well, a whole lot!

Our blogging engine is built on an ASP.NET Web Forms platform. The thing about Web Forms is that it adds a whole bunch of extra and largely unnecessary HTML and JavaScript, which pretty much just slows things down. So I went ahead and stripped it all out. Suddenly our page downloads were about half as big as they were previously. This included the removal of ASP.NET Ajax JavaScript, extra markup for validators, and the happy removal of the bloated and dreaded ViewState.

While that definitely helped things out, it required a pretty major overhaul of the way the internal function of the blog actually worked. I couldn't just rely on the built-in ASP.NET methods for doing things like form validation, Ajax postbacks, and all of the other quick and dirty things that Web Forms takes care of for the develop, ultimately creating a generation of developers who don't understand the basics of what they're actually doing because the hard work and basics of their job have all been handled by some black box. That rant is the web developer equivalent to an old man yelling at the kids to "get off his lawn."

So what does this really mean for you as a reader/user of this site? A fair amount, actually.

First, the speed of navigating from page to page should be much faster than it was before. This has to do with everything from how quickly the server can generate the pages to how quickly they can be downloaded to your computer. We went from a single server and bloated HTML and JavaScript to streamlined and HTML, minified (yes, a major nerd word) JavaScript, all GZip compressed and delivered to the browser in the most efficient way we can.

We also optimized our pages for use behind a Content Delivery Network, or CDN. If you've never heard of a CDN, trust me, you use them extensively throughout the day each and every day. The biggest CDN is a company called Akamai, but there are many many others. Amazon runs one from their cloud computing services. In a nutshell, a CDN is a geographically dispersed network of computers that acts as a middleman between your typing in a domain name and you getting that web page on your browser. During that middleman process, the CDN grabs a copy of that page and stores it locally on their server. That way, the next time someone comes along and types that same domain name, rather than going all of the way to our server for the page, the CDN says, "wait a second, I have that page here on my local storage, I'm just going to pass that back to the user so they don't need to wait for the server to generate it." Then you typically get the page in a much more expeditious manner, letting the server focus on the unique tasks it needs to run, rather than the duplicated. In it's most basic form, a typical CDN architecture sort of looks like this...

...But if that's confusing, you can just think of it like this...

YAY CLOUD!

As I said, you've used a CDN every day without even realizing it. Almost every major website in the world uses a CDN. If you've downloaded a file from iTunes, an app on your phone, hit up Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, or watched a movie from Netflix, you've been through a CDN. CDNs are now ubiquitous with the inner function of the Internet, and without CDNs, our lives would be way less convenient.

If you've never heard of a CDN, and you just read those last two paragraphs, I've just satisfied your nerd quota for the day. You're welcome.

Okay, beyond speed increases, what do these changes mean for you? Well, it primarily has to do with commenting. If you comment on this site, we really appreciate you. And to show you just how much we appreciate you, we've made commenting way better/cooler.

Now, when you submit your comment, the submission takes place right there, without refreshing the page. Once it succeeds, your comment is put in its correct spot and you see it immediately.

Yeah, I know, that's NBD, blogs have done that for years, welcome to 2005. But there are two new capabilities that we have now that you don't typically see on blogs.

After posting your comment you now have a window of 15 minutes where you are able to edit your comment. No more submitting your comment only to realize you've made a horribly euphemistic typo that is now tied to you on the Internet for all of eternity. Now, when you accidentally say "The penis mightier than the sword," you can now click the edit button and make your correction and nobody will ever need to know what you originally said.

And even better, if you accidentally perform the dreaded double or triple comment post, effectively saying "hey, y'all, I'm new here on the Internets and just learnt what this mouse button did, so, like, sorry, y'all!" You can now click edit comment and delete those few errant posts, hiding your Internet noobdom from the rest of the website's visitors that would have undoubtedly judged you for your faux pas. The Internet is a giant scene from Mean Girls, if you didn't know.

So now that we have all of these updates out of the way, we can get back to doing some actual DIY on our house. I mean, our bathroom isn't going to finish itself (I thought it might, I was proven wrong). We hope these changes we've implemented will make your experience on our website just a little bit nicer, and that maybe, just maybe, some of my mounds of otherwise useless tech knowledge has helped to round out a bit more of your knowledge of the Internet's inner workings. If you didn't know about it before, now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

And the last thing, if you notice some weirdness, odd behavior, or something that seems to just not work quite right (or at all), we'd be forever grateful if you wouldn't mind letting us know. 

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Lately, in addition to all of our hard work we've been doing on our various house tasks, we've been working on a few upgrades and some reorganization within our blog too, and it just wouldn't be fair to our blog not to mention it (our house can't get all of the glory). Just in case you hadn't noticed, over the weekend we put up a new link in the top navigation bar that links to our new "Renovation" page.

The Renovation page will serve to provide quick links to the various post categories that have to do with the major projects organized by room/area that we've written about thus far. In each case we've provided a before, during, and after photo of the project, and a link that will take you to a listing of the various posts for that project.

Lately, we've just felt like we're getting so many posts (368 so far) that it may not be overly obvious what's what and where to start, especially for newer visitors. We're hoping this new page with rooms and major project links will help everyone find the information they're looking for if curious about the tile we used in the vestibule, how we quickly made over our guest bedroom, or what we did when we found termites had eaten nearly the entire back wall of the kitchen (hint: if you don't know, it wasn't pretty).

As we write about projects we've already completed, and as we complete additional projects, we'll be sure to add them to the Renovation page. We're just very hopeful that the newly completed projects will come much sooner than later.

In other news about the blog, I'm 100% certain (ok, maybe 99.9%) we've resolved the duplicate post issue in the Google Reader RSS feed, so if you unsubscribed out of annoyance (I don't blame you, it was really annoying), you can subscribe again and will only get one post per day.

We've also been fighting with Facebook integration quite a bit of late. You know the little Facebook Log In button? Yeah, the little blue one you see on this site near the comments, and on many other sites too? Well, Facebook has been having some reliability issues with that button and how it acts. We've been working hard and trying to update how it works, but if you're having trouble commenting on any of our posts, it's pretty likely that little blue button is to blame. If anyone knows Zuck, can you have him work on the reliability of his SSL connections? That would help a lot. Thanks.

We actually love the virtual high fives that are our blog comments, and the last thing we want to do is prevent you from leaving one, so our apologies if this has impacted you. After much thought and hard work, I think it's more or less resolved now, but please let us know if you have any continuing errors or issues. 

And the final item we just recently resolved, drumroll...I think our website finally looks the way it is supposed to in Internet Explorer! Yay! Being a Chrome, Firefox, Safari user, I had no idea just how bad our website was looking in Internet Explorer. The navigation was messed up, things were pushed to the side and out of whack, so many issues. But I think everything is more or less resolved, and in my testing on IE8 and IE9, it seems to be looking the way I expect it to. So if there are any IE users out there that are experiencing odd issues, please let us know. Like our house gremlins, these are our website gremlins, and we're trying to knock them out one at a time.

If you want to make your own IE voodoo doll, head over to the Chigarden Tutorial. I might need to make one of these for work. I've been fighting with IE there too.

Well, that about does it for blog news. We're still working on a nice house floor plan, and will hopefully have that in the coming weeks. Do you have any burning questions about our blog you'd like us to answer? Perhaps a feature request or change? Let us know, we're always trying to make this place more friendly for our readers.

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We've been hard at work on a couple of projects around Old Town Home lately, some that we hope are interesting, and a few others that are...hopefully going to be more interesting once a little more is done. While we've been spending lots of time on various tasks that are not particularly sexy, like insulation and duct work, we've also been quite hard at work on a feature or two here on the blog. It's funny, work on the blog can be nearly the same level of efforts as home renovation, just less dirty. So why not share some of our progress on the blog with you. At least it's way more interesting than what else we've been doing lately...

Now that we've been up and running for over a year and we've amassed quite a few posts on various topics under our e-belts, we just feel like there needs to be a better way to organize some of our more relevant posts. Our old projects page was a complete mess, complete with a smattering of some projects here and there, more crucial projects omitted from the page, outdated material, and just an unpleasing layout.

Ugh. We know we can do better, so we decided to focus our efforts on beautifying this space. If you click on the "Projects" link in the navigation bar you can see the updated layout. It's categorized, more up to date, holds a lot better information, and best of all, lots of pictures. You can click on any given thumbnail to go right to that post, or click on the "see more" link on any category to see all posts that fall into that given category. We'll be continually updating this page as we put up new and relevant posts for each section, so you can easily reference the stuff we do that you care about most from this page. We really hope you like it.

I know, I know, this isn't home renovation, it's blog renovation, but we've been working really hard on it, so we wanted to take a moment to highlight it for everyone (otherwise you'd just go on about your day thinking we still had our old, crappy projects page, and we can't have that). We hope you like the new layout and the organization of information. Let us know what you think, we'd love to hear it.

While we're at it, in other blogging news, I think I've finally figured out the issue with duplicate posts in everyone's Google Reader. This issue only took me about a year to figure out, but I finally tracked down the bug. Honest, I blame Google. :-)

Hear me out through my rambling technical explanation. When we built the blog, I included RSS feeds on almost everything. The home page, category pages, archive pages, individual posts pages -- they ALL had RSS feeds listed in the meta data of the HTML. I figured this would be a great way to let people subscribe to feeds that they really care about, so if you only care about Woodworking, and someone else only cares about Open Housing, each person could subscribe only to that feed. Well, apparently Google Reader didn't like my idea. Google Reader viewed each of these feeds as unique items from Old Town Home, and even though they all had the same URL, Google Reader put them in as "new" items. The end result was that everyone who subscribed to any of our feeds were getting four, five, six, or more duplicate posts every day. Annoying!

Many readers let us know about this annoyance, but I didn't know how to deal with it. Google Reader doesn't have a good method of debugging or troubleshooting, so this one came down to just thinking through the problem. Why am I rambling on about this rather than just saying "hey, it's fixed"? I figure that some day, someone will search for "Google Reader Duplicate Posts" because they're having the same issue, and we may just have the answer they're looking for. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but it's there just in case.

There you have it, our little update on the blog front. We have a list of other site improvements we're working on too behind the scenes (ahem, our floor plan), but we'll get to all of those when we have time. Until then, we need to get back to work on the extra boring items in our house. I think I need to go water the vegetable garden or crawl back up into the sauna of our attic. Oh joy.

Do you have anything you'd like to see us implement or fix on our blog? Let us know, we'd love to be able to work on stuff that make's everyone's experience better.

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To be perfectly honest, we were both a little nervous going into it. This was the first time either of us have done anything like it outside of work-related public speaking, so we didn't want to be boring, obnoxious, or clueless, nor did we want to publicly humiliate ourselves. To our pleasant surprise, we felt like we were able to give some decent answers to the DIY questions from the group.

The thing is, Wendy and I have opposite presentation styles, so it made prep a little hard. She's a preparer and rehearse-er, where I'm a wing-er and prayer-er. But in the end, much like in life and our renovation, our opposite styles, strengths, and approaches helped to give the people who attended a (hopefully) entertaining and enjoyable evening. Let's be honest, it didn't hurt that there was wine and delicious cupcakes to be had.

And there were also plenty of great products around the store that could distract from any lack of knowledge we may have had.

Our invitation to this workshop and a few previous conversations with DIYers on the Internet got us thinking. We've gained a lot of DIY knowhow and understanding on how a project can be completed. Sure, we're not pros or anything, but if something we've done in the past can either help another person avoid some mistakes or end up with a job well done, we'd love to share. What's better? We have a very knowledgeable group of readers that frequent this site that can add to our answers, or possibly step in when we have nuthin'.

So as of today we're starting a new section called "Ask Old Town Home." You'll have the opportunity to ask and have your questions answered to the best of our ability. Just head on over to our "Ask" form and fill out any questions you may have about our projects, your projects, a recipe you saw on our site, Alexandria, Washington, DC, or or anything you think we may be able to help you with. 

You'll be able to get to the "Ask" form at any time using the "Ask Old Town Home" button (pictured above), located in the right hand column of the blog.

As we receive questions we'll review them and will do blog posts where we answer some of the top (judged arbitrarily by Wendy and myself) submissions. Best of all, if we haven't a clue, there's a pretty good chance one of our readers will be able to chime in to provide their insight.

What do you think? Do you have a burning question about any of the work we've done? Or maybe you're stumped on a project and want a little nudge. Shoot us a line and we'll give you our non-scientific approach and reply.

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The whole process has been fun, enjoyable, frustrating, enlightening, helpful, engaging, surprising, and invigorating, all rolled into one. Through our blog we've had the great opportunity to meet some wonderful people, both local and quite far away, experience a few events we otherwise may not have, and share some of the experiences and adventures we've encountered along the nine year journey of renovating our old home while living a vibrant historic district. Heck, we even made fools of ourselves on the DIY network. Opening up our home to a television crew was a first for us. 

Now that we have a solid year of blogging under our belts, I think it's time for our obligatory reflection post to look at where we've been, what we've learned, and where we are going.

Where We've Been

In the weeks running up to launching Old Town Home, we waffled back and forth about whether anyone cared. We knew that some friends and family were interested in what we have been doing, and many of them still live in Ohio or other places in the Midwest, so we figured this would be an excellent way to keep them informed of our goings on. We've also had several other friends and neighbors along the way comment that we had done so much in our house that we should chronicle it and share it (and those who know what blogging is suggested we do it all online). It all sounded like a great idea, but beyond those select few people, we knew we were ultimately blogging for ourselves. 

We also knew that blogging would be a major time commitment and we didn't want to just do it half way. I mean, there's nothing worse than the zombie blog that has a welcome post, then a new post every three months that basically says "I've been so bad about keeping this updated, I'm gonna do better." So we decided to take a leap of faith and commit ourselves to going all out. If we couldn't sustain the level of effort, no harm, no foul, we could stop.

Though we started this project as a simple DIY blog to cover our never ending renovation, much like many of our home's projects, the actual implementation strayed from the initial vision, but hopefully for the better. Soon after beginning, we realized that a large part of what makes this a unique and bloggable experience is the fact that we live in the midst of a treasured and unique historic district. Many people renovate, many people do it themselves, and many people restore and update historic homes, but there aren't a lot of bloggers that that do all of this stuff together. As a result, in addition to our recount of projects, we started to post frequently about the wonderful place that we live, the events we encounter, the things that we enjoy, and the stories or attractions on a local level that may be appealing to people who don't actually care all that much about how you install wainscoting on a stairway.

Essentially, I'm talking about the fact that our DIY blog quickly turned into a blog about our lives, but I guess that's kind of the point of a personal blog. We're not a magazine or "how to" show, we're just a couple who has had and continues to have what we feel are unique opportunities and collections of experiences in our lives that we'd like to share with others and chronicle for ourselves. In retrospect, the change in course makes sense, but we didn't see it coming as we embarked on the project.

Throughout the year, we've covered everything from our extremely in depth vestibule renovation and reconfiguration...

...to the arrival of the Colombian Tall Ship, Gloria's arrival in Old Town on a random spring day.

In the year that's elapsed, we've made an earnest effort to share some of our best DIY tips and tricks, a few of our past projects in a quick start to finish manner, our current and ongoing projects as we slowly complete aspects of them, some of our favorite vacation destinations and ideal itineraries, the exciting places and events we've had the opportunity to enjoy, some insight into our lives and how we live and think as individuals and as a couple, and a few tales to answer one of our most frequently asked question, "So, is your house haunted?"

But to be completely honest, I think we've both had the most fun at each other's expense. The posts where we've poked a little fun at each other, perhaps talking about a certain individual's bag hoarding issues, or another individual's propensity for accumulation in our cramped basement, have been the ones that both get the most reaction from commenters, and also really truly allow us to be who we absolutely are pretty much all the time. I think our good friends can vouch for us on this one, what you see is what you get.

What We've Learned

Over our collection of 308 posts (including this one), we've learned one thing above all else. Blogging is hard. We've heard this repeatedly over the years from friends and other bloggers, and we always thought, "How hard can it be? You take some photos, write some stuff, and put it up, done." Well, we were surprised. Blogging about something we've done, especially a project, typically adds hours to the endeavor. 

Remembering to take photos when you're in the midst of something, writing about the various steps, editing each other's posts, fact checking, linking, etc. It's not hard in a back breaking labor outside chopping wood all day sort of way. It's more hard in a mentally draining sort of way. I'd say that we probably spend a couple of hours on almost every blog post. Some we do in one day, some take several days of work, but every post we do we try to make as thorough and informative as possible. Most importantly, we try to never end up with a filler or throw away post, there's just no point in the partial effort in one.

So whether we're talking about the square foot garden we're working on building and planting...

...or using a Pinterest Challenge to cover just how we went about cutting the bottom off of a wine bottle, we try to be as thorough and useful as possible in our photos and descriptions.

We've also learned that there are some really wonderful people out there who read and comment on our posts on a regular basis, and that is something we truly did not expect. Our efforts in restoring our home and sinking a significant amount of time and money into the process have been appreciated by many people, and nearly everyone that has commented here and left us a message on Facebook, Twitter, HomeTalk, HomePodge, Pinterest, Old House Web, Apartment Therapy, email, other blogs where we've guest posted or been featured, or any of the other outlets where we've interacted with people have been very positive, supportive, and overwhelmingly enjoyable.

Where We're Going

This is the question that we can look at  and quite honestly say, "We have absolutely no idea." Though this little blog of ours has been a lot of hard work, it has also been extremely rewarding. From the friends we've met, interactions we've had, and things we make sure we take part in because "it might make a good blog post," our blog has helped us to enjoy and appreciate what we do on a daily basis. Either directly or indirectly due to the blog, we've had various opportunities to have our home featured in several online and print publications, we've been fortunate to participate in fun events (such as an upcoming DIY seminar in Old Town), and have formed some pretty great friendships.

In the coming months as our work schedules hopefully slow down just a little bit, we hope to have more time to actually work on some major projects in our home so that we may continue sharing them with you. We also hope we can continue to bring you some projects from our past that will show you some of the other great things our home has to offer. And we hope to continue to write about all of the truly great things that our home and home town possess. 

In the last year we've only begun to scratch the surface of the nine years we've invested into our house and lives here in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. We hope you'll continue to follow along to see our various endeavors and misadventures. We may not know what the coming year has to offer, but we're pretty sure we'll have a good time talking to you all about it. Hopefully a year from now we'll be talking about how great our second year of blogging has been.

Thanks for being a part of our lives and our adventures, we appreciate all of the very helpful and positive feedback we've received, and all of the personal interactions we've had. We'll continue working hard and sharing our work and life as long as you all feel like reading about. Here's to one year!. 

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