The savvy web folks here at the Times have given the Seattle Sketcher blog a fabulous upgrade!

See the new blog at http://blogs.seattletimes.com/seattlesketcher (The RSS feed has changed so you may have to re-subscribe if you were accessing Sketcher through Google Reader or any other reader-like applications.)

What's new at http://blogs.seattletimes.com/seattlesketcher?

True blog experience: Click on "Next Page" at the bottom of the scroll and you won't be dumped into a search-results window. You'll go to more sketches and posts presented in blog form, just like on the blog's homepage.

Browse the full archive: More than one thousand sketches published over more than 500 posts since 2009 are now just one click away. Scroll down the archive pull-down menu on the sidebar to take a trip back to the past. Want to see the first post? Here it is.

Categories: Now I can organize blog posts in categories such as, buildings, boats, cars, sketching field notes... Click on the category name at the bottom of each post and all related posts will appear. You can also scroll through the list of categories on the sidebar.

Tag cloud: See all those names of familiar places on the sidebar? Ballard, Fremont, Queen Anne ... Click on them to bring up all posts I've published with sketches drawn there. Isn't that awesome?

Well, you can tell how excited I am about this upgrade. A big thank you goes to Lauren Rabaino, Times News Apps Editor, for making all this happen.

(Note, I'm going to need some time to fully categorize and tag the complete archive. Some related posts may not show up until I do that.)