A Little Organization Is A Good Thing

Channeling Ms. Martha Stewart, I get a big urge to organize with the passing of the holidays or the changing of the seasons - whether it's one room, the whole house or this little ol' blog.  Earlier this week I packed up all the Christmas decorations, but as I mentioned before, there really wasn't much to pack up.  There's definitely some organization needed throughout the rest of the house, but that would require me to go to our freezing cold unfinished upstairs.  Not gonna happen.  So with the house out of the question for now and with a little motivation from Katie over at Bower Power, I decided to organize the blog.

I used to have a "Tutorials" page that was just a running list of the project name and a link.  Pretty plain, pretty uninspiring.  If I were looking at any other blog I probably would skip right past it.  Taking from my "get 'er done" resolution, I finally put in some work and updated my project page.  The "Tutorials" page has now been completely replaced by the "Project Gallery" page.

The Project Gallery is a much more attractive reference for my projects.  Rather than a running list of text, it's now a nice gallery of project snapshots that are hyperlinked to each respective blog post.  Not only is it more visibly appealing, but it also shows new readers my style and what this little blog is about, which is pretty much a little of everything...just like my eclectic style.

For those of you fellow bloggers out there, I blog on the blogger platform, so I had to create my own gallery.  You lucky wordpress bloggers have access to an awesome plugin, Catablog, which streamlines the process and can even be used to create shops.  (If there IS a similar gadget for blogger, I'd love to hear about it.)

Even without Catablog, it's still pretty easy to create a gallery on your own.  I began by creating a new page and then made headers for each of my projects' categories.  I resized my blog to allow three photos to fit side by side in the body of the page.  Next,  I went through my project photos and chose one photo to represent the project.  I sized the photo down to 200x200px and uploaded it onto the new page and linked each photo to its original post.  To position the photos next to each other I had to delete the following code: "float:  left;" (yours could say float:  center or right depending on your starting position.)  In true blogger platform fashion, there was a bit of wrestling and troubleshooting but that's pretty much all it took.

I for one am digging the change and it will be nice to have such quick access to each project.  How do you like the change?  And you fellow bloggers, have you created a gallery for your own blog?  How did you do it?