The Bad
Recently this blog has had a lot of setbacks and also a lot of great milestones and updates. Getting the setbacks out of the way, the major one that kind of broke my faith in the internet is Black Cat got hacked. It made me feel super violated and also took time to find, fix, and set up new safeguards to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But now it’s behind me and I’m ready to reclaim my blog and my nails!
The Good
Website Updates
Now to the good news – over the last year or so I have been working with my friend who is a web programmer to do lots of amazing updates on the Black Cat Nails blog. Here is what is what was added over the past year:
- Home Page Slider – The top of the homepage now features Black Cat’s most popular posts, any awesome new products I’m currently loving, or giveaways when there is one.
- Sidebar – Added a handy sidebar to every page and post to help with navigation.
- Social Media & RSS – This might be my favorite part – my new galaxy social media widget – a handy tool making it easy for you to follow BCN with your favorite feed. You can also sign up to receive posts by email so you never miss a thing!
- Search – Put in any keyword here and you can see every post and page that mentions that term in a slick format. Try it out – here is a search for “Rainbow“!
- Sponsors – Wanted to let you in on my favorite products and nail art suppliers of the moment. I only support products that I truly love and get excited for personally.
- Archive Page – Updated the archive page which is now a great way to browse everything that BCN has to offer. It includes Posts by category, month and by tag broken up into meaningful groups, such as color, brand, style and technique. I hope that this will make it easy for you to find just what you are looking for – for example “nail care“.
- Poke Around – I have also added a few other ways to look around the blog and share posts and pictures that you like:
- Popular Posts – Added to the sidebar and the homepage slider.
- Recommended Reading – On the bottom of each posts are six more posts similar that you might enjoy.
- Social Sharing – Sharing is caring – share your favorite posts with your friends!
- Categories & Tags – Also listed on the bottom of each post, these are now better organized and thoughtfully grouped to make looking around easy and fun.
- Responsive Design – The site has always had a responsive design (meaning it will resize based on your browser window) but a few things were a little “quirky” before. All of these little issues have been fixed and the blog now has a really slick design that actually works.
- New Buttons!
- Pinterest Paw -You may have noticed the cute new “Pinterest Paw” button that allows you to easily pin pictures to Pinterest. Just hover over the picture you want to pin and click ON the the little paw – easy peasy. The button is available on 98% of the pictures on this blog. Scroll over the picture below to see it in action.
- Disclosure – Sometimes you will see a button on the top and bottom of a post that says “Press Sample” or “Affiliate Link” to let you know what type of products I’m using.
- Photography
- I broke the lens of my main camera, which as I’ve mentioned before is over 10 years old. I now use my iPhone exclusively for all pictures on this blog. In case your curious it is an iPhone 5S, which has a 9 megapixel iSight camera and I use an app called ProCamera to take photos since it allows me a lot more control than the built in camera (white balance, ISO settings, exposure, anti-shake, etc.) For all the awesome macro photos you see on the blog, I use the Photojojo macro lens.
- I also invested in a new light for my lightbox set-up – and man is it BRIGHT, and the light bulb is awesomely huge! It was a great investment at only $32.00 and came with a bonus stand that I didn’t end up even needing.
- Last I discovered the monopod which really is a perfect camera holder for taking photos of nails – now it doesn’t get in the way of my arm at all! I purchased this one from LimoStudio and this universal phone mount from Square Jellyfish.
I hope you like all the new changes! If you don’t like something, something isn’t working, or you have any suggestions please leave a comment below or contact me. I would love to hear your thoughts!
Random Nail Art
Just because the blog was hacked and down, doesn’t mean I wasn’t painting my nails! Here are a couple random pics I took during regular life (not in the lightbox) of some nail art done over the last couple of months.
I also tried out a completely rounded shape and liked it. Then promptly broke my nails twice, both times because of roller derby. I don’t know how other people maintain long nails and play derby – but I’m back to nubbins so I don’t have to think about it while I practice, lol! It’s so distracting while I’m at practice if my nail breaks – my brain is screaming NOOOOOOOO! For the love of the universe!!! But they are now slowly regrowing.
While my nails regrow I’m going to share some nail art I did and wasn’t able to post during all the commotion with the blog. But I’ll be back up with new nubbin nail art in no time!
Follow Black Cat Nails:
Way to go – making lemonade out of lemons!!! I’m sure it was awful to be hacked but it gave you impetus to make changes. Horrible way to get the incentive, but, well, might as well make use of it. Your changes look interesting – you must be so excited! A lot of new features to explore! Take care (derby can be dangerous!) and look forward to the future here!
Hi Lara,
Thanks so much! Yes, I am excited and feel the blog has really come together now. Getting hacked was horrible, but I made all sorts of changes and have a new plugin (Wordfence) that allows me to get an email notification any time a change is made so I don’t think it can happen again! Thank you for stopping by.