You may have noticed something different about Jewlicious… allow me to explain. Those of you who are my facebook friends would know that October 9th was my birthday (thanks for the greetings!). This year, this otherwise joyous occasion fell right smack in the middle of Yom Kippur. This of course did not make for a very happy birthday to me. So what I did was I went to hebcal and found out that my Hebrew birthday is on the third of Cheshvan which begins the evening of November 1st. Meaning… right now!

So I thought it would be a nice thing to freshen things up a bit and thus I am releasing this new design tonight in honor of my Mom because apparently I came out sideways when I was born. Don’t ask…

Anyhow, you’ll notice that the comments now support gravatars. You can upload your gravatar, basically a photo or some other depiction of you, at gravatar.com. It makes for a more friendly comment section I think when you can associate a face or a depiction to a nickname. It’s easy to do and takes like 5 minutes.

Also, Jewlicious writers will be able to use the built in functionality of WordPress to place images where they like and even add captions without having to enter any extra code. You can see that demonstrated in the photo here of my Mom (Brakha – of the famous shakshuka recipe) and my Dodah Channah. Mom was in Israel this summer and we spent a lovely day in the old city. She prayed and cried at the Kotel (”I didn’t cry!” “Yes you did Mom, I have the pictures…”) and then I kind of tricked her into going into the Arab shuk which she hates. She’s smiling here but really she wanted to strangle me. Afterwards we had coffee at Mamila which both Mom and Dodah Channah loved. She said that the old neighborhood they razed to build the Mall was a dump. Oh well.

Finally I guess the most dramatic change is the featured content gallery at the top of the page. It will contain direct links to previous posts that for whatever reason we decided to feature. It’ll add some splashiness and added functionality and, as always, more work for me.

Anyway… hope you like the new theme. Hopefully it’ll take us into our 5th year in style. I still have to tweak it a bit and if you encounter any problems let me know.