I guess I should have named it differently, not a 6 month update but rather “Just Lately.” In the last few weeks I’ve continue to work on the family blog more than on this blog. Seems that there is more material coming in from my family life than from my professional life.
One big change is the look and feel of this site. I had been experimenting with the WordPress 3.8 beta and with the Twenty Fourteen theme. I can see the great value of having a true testing environment for a blog. You can try the beta releases, try new ways of posting material and trying to make big changes without messing with your actual site.
I’m really liking this Theme, is very simple, but looks very slick and professional. The featured content is currently giving me trouble, but right now it’s working so I won’t monkey with it anymore.
I moved to a new wordpress instance for my poems, mainly so I didn’t have to mess with the main loop of the site. Previously I was filtering out any post that had the “poems” category and then doing my own category page. That was a good learning experience, but the end result was never as good as I really wanted it. Now I like how it looks and it is a different experience for the reader.
The instance poemas.fammijangos.com is using the Theme LESS, which I first saw on Gina Trapani’s blog Scribbling.net. I knew that I wouldn’t want to use it on this site, but when I was considering moving out all of the poems it made sense to use that theme.
This Twenty Fourteen update has messed up some images, specially the headers, so I’ll continue to clean that up, but it really was uneventful. A few months back, I had a big problem because I messed up some backups, and lost a few posts. I was doing weekly backups, but was overriding the previous week’s data; but I clicked on the wrong file and I overwrote live site with the beta site; then then I wanted to load the beta with the live site and mistakenly loaded live site, but WITH THE BETA DATA, which was considerably outdated. Thankfully I was saving the RSS feed, so I had the text, and the images were not lost. Now I have a weekly backup, that I save in 2 places AND I keep all copies.
On a final note I’ll mention that I have continued to heavily use GIMP and Inkscape. I use it at home, and work so I continue to improve my skills. You’ll see that many of the composites are done in GIMP and the lettering and diagrams are from Inkscape. Hopefully I’ll be a master of these tools soon enough.