Header 1.0
My stats say there have already been 43 visits today, so some of you may have seen the header while in its state of flux. After talking it over with the wife (who also thinks the new theme looks more pro! yay!) and sleeping on it, I got the header to about 1.0 stage. I have a couple ideas on how I want to punch it up a bit more, but I want to give myself some time to mull it over.
New Header Image
Just got the new header image up. At least the first draft of it. I’m CLOSE to where I want to be with the header, but it’s going to take some thinking about it to see exactly what I want to change. Slowly, but surely, the website is moving towards what I want it to look like.
Moved Things Around
I’m not somewhere between halfway and three-quarters done with fixing the site to align with my new theme. I moved all but the ads to the footer. (No one’s going to pay to not be seen) I actually like the new design philosophy. Why constantly distract the viewer’s eye form your content with links to other posts or other sites. That can be saved for the end. I’m done with this post - now what? Well, what about these links here at the bottom. I might still need to move some of those around.
Finally Got Caught Up
I mentioned about two weeks ago that my scheduling for the site might temporarily fall apart. I finally got caught up so now I should be able to focus on meeting my weekly schedule. I’m going to try not to let things get that far behind again because I had to discard about a dozen blog post ideas because, while I saved the URL, I didn’t really feel the passion to write about that topic anymore. In some cases I couldn’t remember exactly what point I wanted to make. In other cases, I just couldn’t muster the same feelings for the topic so I just dropped it. I hope you do enjoy what I’ve written and queued up. I know I’m enjoying the comments of my regular readers.
Scheduling
When I decided I was going to blog 5 days a week, I picked five categories I wanted to blog about: Fatherhood/Family, Technology, Culture, Photography, and Politics. And because I only have a certain amount of time to write throughout my day - usually during my lunch break at work with a little bit at home - I started keeping a list of topics I wanted to talk about. The list has grown unwieldly and it’s getting to where I can’t remember the point I wanted to make on some of those posts. Sure, some of that is fixed by better note-taking, but a lot of it is that the way I like to write involves being in the moment. When it’s a month (or more) later, I might not really be in the same headspace to talk about that topic. So I’m going to work on paring back the list. I’m going to keep the same days for each topic so that there might start to be a few gaps in the schedule, but it should roughly even out.
Images
You may have noticed the images overlapping with the right-sidebar. That’s because I tend to write my posts ahead of time and I was expecting to have Wordpress 3.6 and the new, wider theme by now. But I’ll keep going things this way because while it might be a bit uglier now, it’ll look nicer in a few weeks when the new theme is finally out.
Additionally, I’m making some changes in my screenshots page to make use of galleries. Hope you find the new method a bit more organized-looking.
Change to Comments
In response to the fact that most of the spam comments on my site are on older articles and given that historically no one has commented on posts older than a couple years anyway, I’m enabling Wordpress’ auto-close on comments for posts older than 2 years.
Tagline change
I’ve had the same tagline for a long time, but it hasn’t always been the same. In 2007 I had a focus on computer animation where I now focus on photography. I’ve been watching a lot of presentations from Wordcamp 2013 and one of them inspired me to focus on trying to blog every day (just as how I did photography every day for a year to practice photography and get better) and to focus on a certain topic per day.
Wordpress Upgrade
Know that there are a lot of errors on upgrading. Some files are not updating correctly via SVN. I had to do a fresh install and copy in my config/plugin/theme files. Annoying, but it’s done. I probably won’t be upgrading my other WP sites for a while.
Wordpress 3.0 is out!
Looks pretty awesome. I’m about to switch over. Hopefully nothing breaks.