BellyBelly - the largest natural birth, parenting, and lifestyle forum in Australia.

Many of those who know me will know that I am a frequent posted on a web forum known as Belly Belly – the largest natural birth, parenting and lifestyle forum in Australia. I can often be found lurking the child health and homebirth forums. Well, I am proud to announce that I have been offered (and accepted) a position on this forum as a moderator! I’m very excited – it’s a great forum, one of the largest and most supportive I’ve ever been involved with. The owner, Kelly Zantey, is a crusader for women’s birth rights in this country, and recent highlights include her addressing the Minister for Health regarding women’s issues in this country.

If you want to visit, you will find me under the username Schmickers.

I am also in the process of prettifying (is that a word?) our photo galleries. I am probably 90% complete now, but don;t be surprised if you see the odd duplicate gallery, or if the gallery styles switch off occasionally and you just get plain old text and pictures. I am still tinkering under the hood.  I am also in the process of cataloguing our photographs, so expect a revamp of the photo albums in the near future, with some new photographs – and captions!

 I actually really liked the old site design, but it had one major flaw that I did not really appreciate until the 11th of October last year; the header photographs didn’t have Olivia in it. Which was a bit of a shame given that she is now a pretty permanent fixture in our household.

 I could have tried getting another photograph of a similar composition with Olivia in it for the purposes of the website, but it was just too hard; for a start, all of the photographs we take usually have one of us (Victoria or myself) missing, depending on who was standing behind the camera and pressing the button at the time. As well as that, the previous header photographs was shot against a professional white backdrop; hence, why it blended so well with the white background of the site theme.

 So, time for a change. In the next couple of weeks, you will notice the header photographs changing each time you visit; I’m just culling down our photograph collection to find the perfect shots to put into a random rotation for the header, photographs which showcase our wonderful family.

 A note to IE users: This website uses pictures of the Portable Network Graphics format. This format has been around for nearly a decade, and is the defacto choice for web designers because of its excellent transparency support. Transparent PNGs are supported in every major browser except one – Internet Explorer. If you are seeing a solid grey box underneath the “Michael &Victoria title graphic at the top of this page, it means your browser is affected. I am working on a way to work around this, but in all honesty, the best solution is to get hold of a browser that DOES support basic internet standards. Examples include Netscape, Opera, and Firefox, all of which support PNG transparency, and all of which will display web pages to a basic standard that IE  does not meet. Even Internet Explorer 7 supports PNG transparency, so if you can’t bear using anything else, at least upgrade your old versions of IE to IE 7.