There’s a handsome new swimming costume site in town, if you’re looking for Vintage Swimwear. It’s called Siren’s Swimwear, and it really will make you feel like a siren of the sea.

They have three main styles – the classic one-piece, the halter bikini and the booster bikini, all made with figure-flattering, tummy-controlling retro fabrics.

The one-piece looks like one I used to wear before I had kids – a soft thick fabric in navy blue with small white stars. It was a favourite for years, until I finally wore it out. I also bravely ventured back into bikinis a few years ago, and had chosen a hybrid between the halter bikini and the booster bikini, in two pieces, but still covering the tummy.

Strangely, the one piece really looks like a dress I wore in my last dance routine – during dress rehearsals we discovered that my dress rose indecently high, and I had to sew it to my underwear – which basically transformed it from a dress to a halter-neck costume. If I was brave I’d show it here, but then, it’ll be on YouTube in a few weeks anyway, when the dance studio uploads all the routines.

The costumes would also probably be good for a burlesque routine – they have that old-fashioned air about them.

Anyway, they’re cute.

This weekend I converted www.halloween-australia.com to Drupal, my preferred open source content management system. (so far).

Halloween Australia has been one of my best performing sites in a couple of ways. It is usually number 1 at Google for Halloween Australia, and also Halloween Events Australia. Probably because it has one of the few dedicated halloween event calendars, listing around 50 events each year, ranging from streets offering trick-or-treating to big commercial events, and it was definitely built with SEO in mind, to get organic traffic. It was light, source-ordered content, highly optimised, and had some nice incoming links. And with Google AdSense and a few affiliate links, it would make October my highest earning month online.

Last halloween it peaked at 1600 hits on 31 October, but at this time of year its still around the 30 visits/day mark, but it’s starting to ramp up now. There have been 4 events added so far, and a magazine contacted me for an interview last month. (Haven’t done it yet).

But it was labour-intensive. I had to manually approve each event, as it was added – actually by editing a field on the database – I had never got around to writing an approval program. And photos were also supposed to be manually uploaded. I didn’t make it easy for people.

So it was time to convert to Drupal again, to get more community oriented.

I took a few shortcuts. Reused my Christmas Drupal template, and just changed the colour scheme. Styled a few view tables that hadn’t needed styling on the old white background.

Then I had to copy the content across. Create new data types for events, recipes, craft, stories. Create new views for each data type. Manually add the events from this year. Check that access was fine for new members. Then importantly, redirect the old URLs (eg halloween-recipes.php) to the new format (/halloween-recipes/).

Elapsed, it took from Fri night to late Sat night, with a few late tweaks on Sunday, to add polls, and finish the redirects. Probably 6 hours all up.

Again, it will be interesting to see how the traffic continues for the new site. Whether the redirects will work properly, or if I lose any ranking at Google for changing the page URLs.

There didn’t seem to be any negative impact on traffic for Womens Health and Fitness – it’s still around 30 visitors/day.

But now it’s time to learn a new CMS for work – goodbye Drupal, and hello Mura. (There goes Sunday afternoon…..)