Category Archives: Meta

Pardon the Dust

Over the course of the next few weeks I will be working on a redesign of this site as well as a reorganization/rebranding of DriftingFocus.com.

As you already know, I’ve been separating out my various blogs onto their own sites. So, what is to become of my home here at DriftingFocus.com?

Taking a page from various large web presences, I’ve decied to rename DriftingFocus to the DriftingFocus Network. Not only does it more accurately reflect my reality online, but I also thought I’d poke a bit of fun at myself and the blogosphere at the same time.

Read More

Author:
Date:
Categories: Meta
Like This?

Historically Speaking has Relaunched!

Though there are still a few kinks to be worked out, today I am officially relaunching my reenacting blog, Historically Speaking.

After travel, reenacting has always been my most popular subject here at DriftingFocus, and I am glad that it will finally have a home of its own. I have something of a backlog of material that I’ve been waiting for the relaunch to post, so keep an eye on the blog over the next few weeks and if you’re interested in keeping up with my historical exploits, please change your links and subscriptions to: Read More

Author:
Date:
Categories: Meta Reenacting
Like This?

Traveling Tomboy has Relaunched!

Earlier this week I launched the first of my blog redesigns/relocations: Traveling Tomboy

I am mostly finished with my reenacting blog, Historically Speaking, as well, and will probably launch it sometime next week. This weekend’s task is to get a start on my photography blog which is tentatively called DriftingFocus Photography, for launch sometime toward the end of the month. The conversion/redesign process has gone more smoothly than I predicted and as a result I should be finished with the whole process by mid-January, despite the setbacks I had at the beginning.

I will be keeping my old content here, but since the content is now also mirrored at the new site, I will not be updating this site any further with new content. If you want to follow my travel content, please change your links and subscriptions to:

Traveling Tomboy: No Heels, No Makeup, Just Adventure

Author:
Date:
Categories: Meta Travel
Like This?

Why I’m Restructuring my Blog(s)

I’ve had a few folks ask me why I’m reorganizing/restructuring my web presence again, and a moment I had last night with another travel blogger seems to be a good example to base my explanation off of. So, here you go:

Last night, as I was walking back to the Metro with Chris of Packed Suitcase after the joint year-end party for the DC Travel Tweetup/Travel Massive, my reasons for once again moving things around on my site were reinforced for me. I mentioned to Chris that I was once again reorganizing my blogs, and when she said “Again?!?”, I explained to her that my reorganization last year was for the purpose of better branding, and that I had in fact made the problem worse.

Proving my point, I mentioned that I’m having trouble coming up with a tagline for my travel blog, Traveling Tomboy. She asked me if it was going to be a new blog, and I said that no, it’s the same one, and that I have been using that name for a year now, for my travel blog. She had no idea. Frankly, neither does anyone else, it seems.

It should come as no surprise that design plays a huge part in branding, and this is partly where last year’s idea failed. I put all my blogs into one space, but they all look the same, and so people have still been associating them together, as one blog, thus making my separations rather moot. The individual blogs had no branding of their own, only inheriting that of the core DriftingFocus site itself.

While I do still want there to be some commonalities between the various blogs, right now the differences are too subtle, and the distinctions are meaningless. I’m hoping that the restructuring will show the blogs for what they are: different facets of a very active life.

So, that’s why everything is changing again.

Author:
Date:
Categories: Blogging Meta Personal
Like This?

Things never go quite as planned…

So, about those changes I said were coming? The whole DriftingFocus 3.0 thing?

Thanks to some spectacular failures on the part of the software I was going to use to implement those changes, I’ve had to go back to the drawing board.

It’s no longer going to be possible for me to keep all my blogs here at DriftingFocus AND give them all unique looks, and it’s looking like I won’t be using Headway to design those themes, either.

I’m rather pissed that my big ol’ blog plans are circling the drain, but I have a plan.

Yes, a plan.

A plan which looks shockingly like the one I had when I started up this new blog last year. You can see my pretty mind-map over at the post where I first came up with this amazing, revolutionary idea: I’m going to separate my blogs onto their own sites.

(cue crickets)

You see, I had gotten tired of feeling pressured to produce content that was of interest to everyone, so I decided to split up my catch-all blog into multiple blogs. Then, I found this theme, which allows me give the appearance of separate blogs, all while maintaining just a single WordPress install. It seemed like a great compromise at the time, but I didn’t realize just how much I would be bothered by the similar look of all the blogs, or how confused it would make visitors to the site. Having now realized that one should never compromise with blogs, I’m going back to my original idea.

So, over the next few weeks, I’ll be moving my posts here over to their new blogs. Since WordPress now allows exporting by category, I can transfer over my material here to the new blogs. Historically Speaking, Exhaust & Exhaustion, Living Life Frame by Frame, Traveling Tomboy, and Always An Adventure will all have their own sites, while still being connected to my DriftingFocus domain via subdomains or subdirectories (I haven’t decided which yet).

Ultimately, this will give much, much stronger branding to each of the blogs, and will allow me to have separate RSS feeds for each blog, which will make subscribers happy. It will allow me to enjoy the design side of blogging much more and if I decide to start a new blog or end an old one, it’s less of a hassle than it would be through my current system. Plus, I’ll be able to do all of this from behind a hypothetical curtain while this site stays live, and will then be able to “switch on” the new sites almost seamlessly!

So, it may be a few more weeks until things are situated, but I’ll give you folks some occasional sneak peeks at the progress as I go along! I hope that you’ll enjoy the “new” blogs once they launch, but for the meantime, stick around and enjoy the content I’ll be posting here!

Author:
Date:
Categories: Blogging Meta Personal
Like This?

Coming Soon: DriftingFocus 3.0!

Headway Themes has released its new version of its theme, and I am taking this opportunity to do a major overhaul here at DriftingFocus.

There have always been a few things that bothered me about my current theme. It takes forever to load, each post requires theme-specific shortcodes and significant customization, it has bad SEO, it doesn’t play well with most statistics plugins, and most of all, it’s hard to distinguish between the various blogs I have here. So, I’m switching to a theme I’ve owned for the last few years, but have only ever used with clients: Headway

Here are some changes that you will see coming to DriftingFocus over the next few weeks and months:

Each blog will have its own completely different look. Layouts may be somewhat similar between some blogs, but there will definitely no longer be any mistaking which blog you’re currently reading. Unless you look up at the address bar, you may as well think you’ve gone to a completely different site, instead of one of my sub-sites here.

View from the Sidecar is getting a new name: Exhaust & Exhaustion. Marc and I will be getting Nadezda back in late December/early January, and you will start to see a lot more posts about our exploits.

My front page here will be more like a portal. There will be links to my blogs here and to my other web presences. News will be displayed. Blog posts will be displayed as well, but they will be much less of the focus than they are now.

There will be a new, completely photography-dedicated blog. Whether I will keep the name of my old photo blog, Always An Adventure, or choose something new remains to be seen. This blog will be a place for photo-heavy posts, as well as posts about photography technique and processing tips.

——————————-

Over the next few weeks, you may get a lot of errors on this site, or see a maintenance screen instead of what you were looking for. For that, I apologize. However, when it’s all said and done, I think that it will be for the best.

Author:
Date:
Categories: Blogging Meta Personal
Like This?

Sneak Peeks

In anticipation of the release of Headway 3.0 on November 25th, I’ve been working on the “look and feel” for the redesigns I have planned for my various sites. I’ve talked about this a little bit here, but let me explain how driftingfocus.com is going to be evolving over the next few months:

1. I will be moving the database, which will result in much better SEO and tracking but may cause quite a lot of broken links, so I apologize in advance.

2. Each of my blogs on here will have a completely different look. Beyond just different colors and fonts, the whole theme of each blog will be different, and will be tailored to the content and structure of that particular blog.

3. The front page will be restructured to be more of a “home page”, with less emphasis on the blogs and more emphasis on the various content I produce throughout the web.

4. All of this will take time, as I will be doing each “site” one at a time, but I estimate that the work should be mostly done by mid-January.

To give you guys a few “sneak peeks”, I decided to post some of the material I’ve been working on for the various sites. None of these are to be considered final drafts, and the “featured post” samples are merely hypothetical features, but this all should give you at least a glimpse of what my various blogs may look like in the near future.

Headers


Features from the different Blogs





Author:
Date:
Categories: Blogging Meta Personal
Like This?

Two New Prompt Sources: 30 Days of Indie Travel & Blog Your Backyard

Despite having 400-odd drafts that need finishing, I am always on the lookout for good prompts. Even if they too end up in my drafts folder, I find that looking at writing prompts is often inspiring and will introduce me to new directions I can take in my writing.

I have recently been introduced to two sets of prompts that are floating around the travel blogosphere these days: BootsnAll’s 30 Days of Indie Travel Project and Blog Your Backyard

I found the 30 Days of Indie Travel Project through my friend Candice Walsh’s blog, Candice Does The World. Candice is cleverly doing weekly round-ups of the prompts instead of an entry on each prompt, a tack I may very well take myself. I discovered Blog Your Backyard through Brooke Schoenman’s blog, Brooke VS. The World. There’s a lot of information out there on the Washington DC area, but not a lot of info out there on Northern Virginia, where I live, so I’m hoping to expand the available body of knowledge on this area.

So, those are two new themes/prompt sources that you may see pop up here from time to time in the near future. I hope that you’ll enjoy them.

Author:
Date:
Categories: Meta Travel
Like This?