You might notice that the site has received somewhat of a facelift. Actually, a facelift is rather minor. This is more like the Six Million Dollar Man. You know: better, stronger, faster.

I had grown really weary of the old site design, but there was a certain element of pride involved with the fact that I had designed it myself, from the ground up, not to mention that there were some custom things I had done with it that had even prevented me from upgrading WordPress for fear that I might break something on the site. Not that there weren’t already things wrong with the site—the image galleries never quite seemed to work right, for example—but the concept of redoing it all, from scratch, was so daunting as to be completely paralyzing.

I had been trying to come up with a way to incorporate this particular look (a color-shifted variant of the Fusion theme that I was quite fond of) into the site, and using it to help come up with a site design that better fit my current interests. I wanted something that would allow me to incorporate all of the photography I’ve been doing lately, without losing the function and form of the pages I’d already incorporated into the site.

I dunno. I guess tonight was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I decided that come hell or high water, I was both upgrading the software on the site and changing the theme, and I would worry about fixing the problems that would undoubtedly crop up later. It turns out that I didn’t have anything to worry about. The upgrade wiped out the custom changes I’d made, so I didn’t have to worry about extricating them from the internal code—and thankfully, I have since learned that there are easier ways to customize, and I will definitely be using them should I want to make any changes under the hood from now on—and the theme installed flawlessly without any real effort from me. From there, it was a simple matter of moving the content around and installing or upgrading some plugins I had had running.

And speaking of moving content around, some notes on housekeeping:

  • The pages for my Senior Recital and the Plymouth Mozart’s Requiem performance are still here, but are now listed as menu items under the “Music Related” menu at the top of the screen.
  • The same goes for certain site related content: the Privacy Policy, Contact Form and Email Subscription options page are all available as items in the “Site Related” menu up there. Also, in addition to the archives dropdown menu and category listing on the right, there are links to the archives and categories in that same menu.
  • Those of you—particularly family members—who have been going to my Flickr page to look at photos of the niece can now simply come here. I’ve integrated the blog with Flickr, so all of my photosets and albums are available through the Photo Galleries link above. The integration allows for commenting and posting notes on the pictures without having to go to Flickr. I’m hoping that this will encourage you to participate in addition to just looking.

Olivia
See? It’s as easy as clicking the photo album cover here. :)

Ultimately, this overhaul is intended to force me to actually use the skills I acquired during all those years of school and write more. But part of the new look is to incorporate my new hobbies—namely, the photography. I took some photos of a friend’s band at a club this past weekend, and after she looked at them today I was almost instantly offered a paid gig doing promotional photos for the band. Not only is this an enormous compliment, it’s affirming in a way, because I’ve gotten so into photography that I was considering starting up a small business with it, and this kind of thing lets me know that it’s a possibility, even if it’s only local and even if it’s only once in a while. It’s nice to know that people think what you do is worthwhile.

So I’m hoping that I’ll contribute more often to the site, and not just in one medium, but in three—image, word, and music. It’s been a while since I put anything new on the site, musically, but I am working at it, if slowly. And the other two are just as lacking.

If you notice anything on the site not acting as you think it should, comment on this post. And keep an eye out for new content. It’ll be coming, I swear it. Just a reminder that you can subscribe via RSS or email. :)

(You might also notice that the name of the blog has changed. Think of it as my take on nirvana, I guess.)