Mhh… you might have noted some minor changes to my site. I’m actually somewhere “in between” – meaning that the site is still more a pile of building blocks than a functional some-thing. Please stay tuned – and if something looks fishy or does not work at all, I would appreciate a mail at thomas_backhaus@web.de.
The idea was in general to keep the layout and design of the site as simple as possible by all means. It was actually quite hard to find a template for WordPress that works along those lines – you find hundreds of templates with a gazillion of gadgets, animations, space for banners, silly background graphics and those things. But I wanted exactly the opposite. Finally, I settled to start with olipo, a theme designed by Andrea Mignolo and I’m going to work my way from there. Let’s see where I end up.
I decided to make tabula rasa and not import my old posts, comments and photos. To be honest, that was a quite hard decision – roughly a hundred posts, nearly 300 comments and about 120 photos went up in a puff of (virtual) smoke – although everything is of course safe and sound stored in an archive on my harddrive. Which I guess will be starting to collect dust rather soon. I’m also going to outsource my photos and galleries, as I realized that doing that myself is too much of a hassle. More on that soon.
See you around!
Thomas
Definitely a bold decision. So I am looking forward to what will come. Thumbs up and let the images roll in!
I agree with Markus. What made you decide to not drag the old back with you? Did you just want a fresh, clean start?
Yes, sort of. My main problem was to find a decent way of how to integrate all the pictures from my previous posts into the new layout. And just importing the texts only didn’t make much sense.
So, after a couple of fruitless tries I decided to go for a real spring-cleaning. If I regret it, I can always dig into my archives…
[...] were a couple of posts that I found interesting. The first was this post by Thomas, entitled: Life needs to get simpler. In it, he talks about revamping his blog and, basically, casting aside all of his previous content [...]
Well, in a way I can understand it. When I think how much work it was to go from Blogger/SmugMug to my own server and a self-hosted WordPress, I must not even begin to calculate what one could have done with that time. I don’t regret it though. For me, my blog is also an archive of my own life, a place to go when I want to find out where I’ve been and what I’ve thought. A place as well to see how I’ve changed.
A bold move, a beautiful result, nothing that I would do though
I can understand that, but for me it was somewhat easier: I didn’t have as many photos online as you have, my blog was (is) far less extensive. So I can perfectly understand why you (or Paul L.) wouldn’t want to do that. For me it was a chance to start sorting through my photos and see which ones I still like – and which ones I “have left behind”.
Smugmug is just providing a good platform for the galleries. Better than anything I could bake myself, so let’s see how the combination WordPress/Smugmug works…
Well, I like your clean page approach, also the clean design of the web page.
Hi Ove,
…great to hear that you’re still alive!
How’s your renovation coming along?
Thomas