Relaunch!

And my site is relaunched!

This is actually pretty exciting! I’ve done a lot of work to make my website about 50x better (*not a guarantee)! First thing I did is consolidate my web presence. I have a lot of web apps that I just don’t use anymore, so I kicked them out. They’ve been sent to the great recycle bin in the sky (or, if you’re a mac user, they were sent to the great trash can in the sky).

I’ve also had several different WordPress sites accumulate over the years. I had a portfolio site, a blog, and a photoblog I created for a class. I also have an assignment “portfolio” (not really a portfolio, but whatever) and I created a couple of blogs for documenting my NaNoWriMo writings.

No more. I’ve consolidated things in. I’ve combined the portfolio site, blog, and photoblog into this one WordPress site you’re looking at now. I’ll also be moving my NaNoWriMo journal entries into the blog portion of this site too. (The writings will be backed up onto a private WordPress installation.) Basically, everything’s in one place now.

I’ve also done a complete redesign. I’ve moved over to one of the most popular WordPress themes, Responsive, and created my own custom-made child theme for this site. The layout hasn’t changed (I was pretty happy with the clean layout), but I did change most of the colors. It’s pretty sweet.

So how did I do it? I created the new theme last semester for a class, using the mad CSS skills I learned in another class last semester. As far as combining WordPress sites is concerned, it only took a few hours of time. WordPress’s import/export feature is really, really good, and made it super easy to get everything under one virtual roof. I still have some work to do: particularly redirecting the old sites to this new one. Some of the URL schemes have changed, so it’s not going to be super easy. I’m going to have to do some 301 Permanent Redirects on my old sites. That’s going to be fun. Fortunately, I’ve got an idea of how to make it at least a little quicker.

Enjoy the new site!