How nice that it's Friday again - only downside to it: I had wanted (or even planned) to get a bit more stuff done this week. However, I won't complain too much. At least the new batch of pins has been finished,  and a few other odds and ends have been taken care of. Among them some prep for the workshop weekend next weekend.

Now, though: weekend! (Well, a little more work to do, but then.)

And because things are always better with cat pictures, here's one for you. Poor cat must have felt very dirty!

It's been a good while now since I've run out of the brass pins in the shop, but somehow there was this and that and things didn't line up, and I never got around to sitting down and making new ones. 

Today, though, I really felt like doing something practical again for a bit, after all the website and writing things, and I got out the metal-working supplies and started a bit of pin-making.

It begins with preparing the heads, which are made from wrapped wire, then cut into bits: 

Then shanks are cut and hammered into the little head coils, and then I do some more hammering to make sure the heads are decently stuck on the shanks, and then the annoying bit starts: sharpening the tips.

The photo shows half-finished tips on some pins. I'm still not completely happy with the workflow in that part of the process, but at least I'm getting pins already. Some more grinding, and some more testing of possible methods to come... and soon, pins to come back to the shop. Yay!

There've been a few things popping up that I find interesting enough to link them here - even though some of it is in German. You'll cope!

First of all, a video about Germany's last wire weaving workshop. It's very short, and it shows a huge loom right at the start, weaving... wire. 

The second item actually, sort of, potentially also concerns the shop: The Bundeskartellamt (the state's Antitrust Division) has started investigations against Paypal. (English version of that report here. I'm impressed there is one.) Their prices are fairly high for taking payments, and they might be abusing their dominant position. I'm utterly delighted about this, because I have read all their clauses, and they are very, very restrictive in what you are allowed to do as a company using them as payment venue. However... these days, with people from different countries ordering stuff online, and lots of people really appreciating paypal for its convenience and ease of use, it's a rather hard choice to not offer it as a payment option. I get the delight in using paypal as a customer, by the way - it's quick, it's easy, you get the goods right away, and it costs you nothing as a private customer. Well, at least not in a way that you will notice easily, because of course, costs for the payment will be priced in somewhere.

And then a very interesting German-language blog entry from the Archäologisches Freilichtmuseum Oerlinghausen - about the comic "Legenden aus Hamsterland" - which is a very right-wing comic, using elements from Early Medieval culture for the usual right-wing shitbrainy stuff. 

Finally, in English: An open access article about the possibility of some early calendarial notations in cave paintings... An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar. I'm not completely convinced, but it's certainly an interesting hypothesis!

Today was, again, mostly eaten by website shenanigans - a bit of testing here, a little tweaking there, a lot of finding out what still needs to be checked, tweaked, or resolved. Among that, primarily, is the fact that there are a lot of broken or malfunctioning links due to changes in the URL structure, and it turns out not all of that is easy to fix with a simple redirect. Not because there wouldn't be the possibility of the redirect, but because apparently there's some issue with the multilanguage setup of the site...

The problem mostly impacts the blog, so it's not the end of the world, but it is rather irksome. I'm also not yet happy with how the shop looks, with all the items dancing up and down, and the buttons happily appearing further up or further down, but changing this is not something I can do in just a few minutes.

I'm pretty sure that there is a way to get it all lined up properly, but that most probably requires some more knowledge in css and doing stuff that contains the word "flex", and the main problem with that is that it needs extensive testing, because you tweak things to look good in one browser and with a certain width of the window, and then you switch to something else and suddenly it looks like shit combed over. 

So for now, I'm going to settle with "hey, at least it's functional" and see if I can resolve the issue without too much of a headache, and too much time down the drain. After all, there's workshops coming up that I have to prep for, and there is a rather urgent need to make more spindle whorls, and then there's a presentation being planned for the second half of February that I'm very, very hyped about. More to follow about that as soon as I can tell you!

It's always good to have open access publications available - and if you are looking for OA Journals, you might find this Directory of Open Access Journals helpful. 

And if you're reading German and looking for something about clothing regulations in the Early Modern Ages, there's a fairly new book out about those from the archives of Wismar:

That week has flown by, somehow. Well, most of the last two days was gobbled up by the website migration, and there's still a chunk of issues to fix - though I managed to get one or the other already. Like this totally not helpful huge floating image of the basket when you're shopping. Or trying to shop on your mobile phone.

The intention behind this was to have a nice, accessible way to get to the shopping cart or basket or however you want to call it from anywhere inside the shop. So I made this medium-pretty basket image at one point (and there was the idea of replacing it, at some time, with a more medieval-style basket image, but, well, things happened) and inserted it to float at the top of the screen.

Which it does. Unfortunately, with the changed layout of the responsive design, on small screens it blows itself up to maximum size and is not helpful for shopping in peace and quiet anymore... due to overlaying most of the shop. As a customer, that would really annoy me. (Have I mentioned that running my own webshop has made me much more mellow in regard to things not working properly in other webshops? At least partly. Some things annoy me even more now.)

Fortunately, that was rather easy to solve - I just forbid it to display below a certain screen width. Whew.

Other things are not quite as easy; a lot of stuff has changed with the transition to the new major version, and now I have to find old files with my changes again, find out where the new files that have the same info in them are living now, and adapt the new files. There are also issues with changed (and thus broken) links, and the necessity to set up redirects for those. So the list of tasks to do is currently still growing - and I am looking forward to the point where it will shrink again!

So. I hope now that everything was tested sufficiently yesterday and today, and that things will work out without too many issues. Which, potentially, include unwanted design changes in the main site, in the shop, and other glitches there. If you notice anything, please do let me know! 

There will be some layout and design tweaking in the shop in the next days, as the layout I had and preferred was shot by the last larger update of the shop software. Ah, the endless joys of websites and their shenanigans. (To be honest, though, I quite like most of the website work, for a change. I wouldn't want to do it every day, but it is rather nice to be able to tweak things, or take care of some issue myself.)