So, I had my baby and stuff! Many thanks to Megan & Shrie for keeping things running smoothly while I've spent the last 3 weeks getting to know my son, Octavian. Maternity leave has consisted of a lot of feeding uponst his soft pudgey newborn cheeks.

Despite being back from Canada (that's me in the big hat up there), I'm still in summer vacation mode, so posting will be light this week. If you're fiending for some Offbeat inspiration, I encourage you to page back through the archives — there's almost three years' worth of posts for you to read!

Some of you may have noticed that the site was, erm, extremely odd last night and this morning, with tons of dead links everywhere and then some exposed code, and nothing working, etc etc. Well, I'm excited to report that Offbeat Bride has graduated to its own private server

I've spent most of the weekend geeking out on OBB's new commenting system … proving that really, when it comes right down to it, I am 100% web nerd. After seeing IntenseDebate commenting tool being used on genderfork.com (an awesome site that, as they say: “…explores androgyny and gender variance through artistic photography and other neat stuff”) I decided to try installing the plugin here on OBB. And OMG, it's awesome! Commenting on OBB just got white hot… The new commenting tool includes cool stuff like: Commenter avatars (more info about that below) Threading, so you can reply to a specific comment instead of just adding your comment to the end Paging for posts with tons of comments Comment voting so that if you love a comment you can give it a thumbs up Subscribing, so that if you can receive notification when new comments are added to a post Comment reporting so y'all can let me 'n' the interns know if you catch a trollish/spammy comment before we do …and so much more ! Commenters can still leave their comments as a guest, the same as you always have.

Big announcement from me today: I'm three months pregnant! Andreas and I couldn't be more excited … I'm due December 1st.