A Makeover for an Old Friend

It’s getting close to 3 years now that this old personal type blog of mine has been around in one form or another. In fact, it may actually be a bit over 3 years by now considering that several initial posts were lost during the first move from the old Blogger platform to WordPress.com, long before it found it’s way to a self hosted situation. Seems like ancient history now and it’s hard to believe how much I’ve learned since then, especially in how deeply (informally) involved in WordPress I’ve become and how much I’ve enjoyed much helping others out in this respect. In many ways, blogging, the blogging community, the readers and, believe it or not, WordPress itself and the fine community involved in it’s development has kept me going through some fairly dark times health-wise.

A lot has happened since I first began this endeavor especially in how my health or lack thereof has changed my life over the past 3 years and, for better or worse, these changes have reflected in my writing; making it rather harsh sounding at times but one thing that always remained consistent (besides the inconsistency) is that I’ve always remained true to myself. You’ll never have to worry about whether or not I’m trying to be something other than myself.

Okay, enough of that already. So what about this makeover anyway?

Now I know I’ve changed themes from time to time while I attempted to make heads or tails of where I wanted the blog to go vs who I was vs whatever else and, of course, I wanted the looks of the thing to reflect that—whatever it was. It wasn’t until I finally wised up to the fact that it wasn’t where I wanted the blog to go rather than where the blog was leading me that I started to find my place in things. So for the past several months I used a very plain but very powerful theme for the site called Blog.txt and, as time went on, removed all the “baubles” and “bling” from the sidebar that created more of distraction than anything else. This included the text widgets that contained info from certain off site social networks that, unfortunately, would end up grinding my site to an almost complete stop when these particular networks became choked or went down altogether. It’s not that I’ve become less social in nature, it’s more of the keeping site loading times as short as possible so readers don’t become frustrated with the waiting. One of the top reasons that I (and a lot of readers in general) end up not revisiting a site is those unreasonably slow loading times and I wanted to avoid that at much as possible.

And I’m sure you all have noticed the new look of the blog, it’s fairly obvious now isn’t it? The new theme is called “Amazing Grace“, named after that grand old hymn by the same name and one of the very few that I’ve always loved myself (it’s the Gaelic/Celtic blood in me that does it and it should be played on the “pipes” as is proper). And no, it’s not the reason I chose the theme nor have I caught a bad case of religious fervor (God forbid). It’s simply because I like the overall look of the theme, the rotating images in the header and the nice wide content area. That plus it’s one of the only 3 column themes I’ve found where the 2 sidebars don’t distract from the content just by the fact of being there. It’s also one of the only 3 column themes that I actually like that still retains a personal feeling to the thing but that’s strictly subjective on my part so I’ll be curious to see if the folks that drop by feel the same way.

Now I’ve been using this very same theme over at my new tech related site called Green Mountain Geek since the beginning however, since I seem to have come into possession of a fine premium theme (more on this in the next post), then I do believe I’ll wrap that theme around GMG in the very near future and keep Amazing Grace right here at home.

There are things to be done yet as there always are in the case of a site makeover like this. Such as inserting my own images into the header from photos I’ve taken over the years to take place of the default ones that came with the theme itself. I also have to come up with another Archives page since this theme doesn’t incorporate an archives template as some other themes do. For the latter it’s just a matter of finding an archives plugin that doesn’t make 100’s of queries to my poor database just to generate the thing. I’ve got the old site down to a whole 12 queries for the main page now so I don’t want a “heavy” archives page hanging around. And I’ll be spending some time weeding out those very old miscellaneous type posts that don’t really serve any purpose other than taking up space that can be used for something a bit more, shall we say, productive in nature? But that part of it isn’t all that critical so I can take my time with it.

I can’t honestly say that anything will change as far as the type of posts I’ll be writing, my tag line doesn’t say “Consistently Inconsistent” for nothing you know. I’ll be forever wandering from one path to another, exploring down different avenues of thought and, of course, getting ornery from time to time. It’s my nature to just be myself after all. But, as always, I welcome folks with a smile or at least a virtual one, and an invite to come on into the kitchen for a cup of coffee (or whatever) and talk awhile. So for what it’s worth, here I am (still) and here I stay. Hope you enjoy your visit.