On the 2nd day of Blogity: EtsyLou

Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew. What you don't know is that I'm a chipmunk. EtsyLou began last year as a collaboration between Lauren (stellaloella) and I to form a group(street team) for Etsy sellers in St. Louis. In the beginning, street teams were this uncharted territory where type A sellers scrambled to stake their regional claim... present company included. There was really no clear-cut purpose or standard for success. We created a shop, an email, a banner, and waited to see what fishies would bite. Eventually it gained enough interest to warrant a meeting...in June.
What become painfully clear, is that it was a bit silly of us to try putting our nose to the grindstone during the busy show season. We had lots of good discussion about promoting our shops at upcoming shows, things we could do to raise funds, etc. I volunteered to make our website (um, are my cheeks getting fatter?), and had every hope that there would be a lull before Strange Folk to work on it. None such luck, but afterward I had to crack the nut or bury it.
I guess I don't have the balls to bury my yummy nuts! Now, EtsyLou members will be able to interact through creating blog posts, discussions on the forum, scheduled chat meetings, and having a central location to link all our shops and events. Everyone is still getting used to the water, but we'll be swimming laps soon.
As with pretty much all the sites I create, I wanted to learn something new while making this one. I've been playing with content management systems, and decided on Drupal for the back-end. Now, I'm not going to go into details about all that just yet. You're going to have to wait for my "Geeky Friday" post. Lets just say I opened a can of Sandworms, but managed to ride them all the way through template hacks and over database bridges.
I worked diligently on this for a solid month and a half. In the beginning I had visions of brick backgrounds, fluer de lis, stained glass for the motif, but couldn't shake the bright and white instinct. Then the "aha!" moment: Lets just see what I can dig out of Etsy's CSS code... not for the sake of copycatting, but to show it's not infallible. Then, do it justice around a different layout. Now, go on, have a look-see for yourself...toggle Etsy and EtsyLou. I'm not faclemped, but it's buttah and, you can still talk amungst y'selves. I'll give you a topic: EtsyLou, neither Etsy nor a lou, discuss...