Welcome back from the rather suddenly-imposed hiatus, everyone! Glad to see that a few of you are still around and kicking. We at casa domesticat are doing the happy dance, now that our web server is back online.I'm pleased to report that you've missed virtually nothing in the meantime. The cats are still rotten, the house is a bit cleaner than it was last week, and everyone (except Gareth) has gone home (alas, geekfest is over…).

I used the downtime to work on a few things. Very shortly now I'll be implementing some stylesheet fixes to some skins—some very long-needed changes, in fact. I've already made changes to the ubiquitous skinning tutorial, adding some information and augmenting some explanations.

I've got a new tutorial just about ready to go; this one for people just beginning to get serious about maintaining websites. It's a rather chatty little thing, standing at about 3200 words right now, but hopefully will be useful to some people down the line.

In the meantime, I read a couple of books, called a few friends, made plans for visitors (four more are slated for temporary residence in Hotel Domesticat before mid-August) and generally went about my regularly scheduled life.

I still need to call my mother.

Despite what most of you would expect, I don't have a backlog of entries just waiting to be posted. I've taken very little downtime from cat.net lately, and it just seemed silly to not treat this bit of machine downtime as a writing vacation in disguise.

Expect rants, silly observations, and code-posting to begin in earnest tomorrow. For now, here's hoping the skins updating I'm doing now will be smooth and seamless, and that you don't notice any differences at all.

As always, leave the graffiti in the comments area and your message after the beep, and I'll catch you on the flip side.

Changes so far:

• Updated skinning tutorial
• stylesheet updates to all 15 skins
• layout revision to #12, 'myeyes,' to fix bugs and add compatibility for Mozilla and Opera