It’s been another year, and I’ve made some updates to 19th Step.
It’s been a few years now since I was really posting on a regular basis and I attribute that to spending less time traveling and having more outlets for my thoughts and ideas – but it remains a great place to dump my thoughts or drop a note about what I’m working on.
In the past 3 months I’ve been doing a lot of WordPress design and development, modifying themes and setting up new sites. A few (Disco Death, Chengdu Living) of them are online, but the bulk are still in production. I’m looking forward to releasing those and in the meantime I’m having a great time learning more and refining my skills. It’s nice to know that web development has gone in such a modular direction, it’s far less of a headache than it was 5+ years ago because powerful, flexible, and straight forward content systems like WordPress and Joomla have really blossomed.
Having full control over the things that I’m working on is also a luxury that I appreciate each and every single day.
Over the last two days, here are some of the changes I’ve made:
- Changed background, link, and title colors, added a tiled background image
- Added an RSS banner at the top and delegated the feed to Feedburner
- Enabled comments, avatars which work through Gravatar, and added “Leave a comment” link to each post
- Found the right combination of 14 plugins, like WPtouch, which makes the site look pretty on an iPhone or iPod Touch
- Trimmed down the categories. I deleted almost 10 categories that had fewer than 10 posts and assigned the relevant tags to those posts.
- Tagging previous posts. This is a work in progress but I’ve started the process of tagging over 5 years of posts!
- Added links to Chengdu Living, Disco Death, and Just Charlie to the sidebar
- Added a tag cloud to the sidebar. This will become more useful when the bulk of the posts are tagged
- Removed my e-mail address and social network links, and replaced them with a simple contact form.
Nothing left to add to this site except content!