Sweetpea’s Garden

The blog got some spring cleaning and sprucing up yesterday. Here’s what’s new:

• I updated the post author feature, so that now everything comes from me, Sarah (formerly known as Sweetpea) or my sister Eileen (neé Snapdragon). I figured that, even though I haven’t solved the new blog name issue, I can at least transition us to our proper names.
• There are now feeds in the sidebar for just her posts, and just mine, in case you’re only interested in one or the other — or you’ve read a post and can’t figure out which of us wrote it, as the new layout does not have author names on the posts like the last one.
• Speaking of which — I’ve changed the page template and header image.
• I cleaned out the blogroll to delete a few links for blogs that have gone dormant. I’ve also added a few things to the “stuff I like” list.
• I discovered while poking around that WordPress has added an option to include digg, del.icio.us, reddit, and stumbleupon links to my RSS feeds. What, exactly, this means, I don’t know. They’re all different social bookmarking and news sites, but I’ve only used del.icio.us, so I don’t really know how the others work. But I added them anyway, ’cause why not?

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I don’t like the name of my blog. Maybe this isn’t that much of a revelation; I haven’t been happy about it almost from the beginning, and have complained about it off and on to those of you I know outside the blogosphere.

Of course, I have no one to blame for this but myself, since I am the one who named it. And as I wrote shortly after I launched (in response to a handful of WTF? emails from friends) it was in tribute to the nickname my father called me when I was little. And given that I started the blog less than two weeks after his death, it isn’t all that surprising that I went in that direction for a name.

There are a few reasons why I wish I had called the blog something else. I’ve realized that I am not especially comfortable with other people calling me Sweetpea, which is why I never correct anyone or make edits when someone slips and calls me Sarah. I also find the name “Sweetpea’s Garden” to be almost irredeemably hokey. I honestly can’t believe I came up with it. And, finally, it just doesn’t suit me. You’d have to be running really, really low in your big box of adjectives to pull out “sweet” to describe me.

I’ve done some poking around, and — much to my relief — it looks like I won’t need to start from scratch if I want a new blog name. All I need to do is buy my own URL and WordPress will set up re-directs for it, so all the old links and stuff will still work. This doesn’t seem like a bad option.

Now, all I need to do is think of a new name, but I am coming up blank. Any suggestions?