Tag Archives: blogging

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

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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.

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Life Update

I haven’t talked much about what’s been going on in my life, or what my plans are, and I thought it was time. Since there’s always a lot going on, I figured I should probably cue my readers in. So here’s what’s been going on in my life lately:

1. I’ve started taking Parkour classes at one of the 12 gyms in the world that teaches it. Every class thoroughly kicks my ass, but I can already tell that I’m getting stronger. Parkour focuses on functional fitness and strength training, which is the direction I’ve always felt is best when it comes to exercise-related stuff. Plus, I get to spend my evenings jumping on stuff, cllmbing on stuff, and generally pretending to be a ninja, which is pretty damn awesome. Marc is probably going to start coming with me in January, which will be fun, as it will be something for us to do together as a couple.

2. Marc and I are taking a quick trip up to New England this weekend. We’re leaving tomorrow afternoon and returning next Tuesday night and will be visiting western Massachusetts and Vermont. I haven’t seen some of my best college friends in four years, and it’s about damn time. So, we’ll be starting off in the Pioneer Valley, where I went to college, and then will be spending a couple days exploring southern Vermont. Marc and I have toyed with the idea of moving to Vermont, and while I’m familiar with the area, Marc has never been there, so I want to give him a bit of a feel for the state.

3. I’m going to be going home to Houston, TX for a few weeks over the Christmas holidays. One advantage of doing teaching work is that you don’t have to worry about taking off time during the winter holidays, and I fully plan on taking advantage of that. While I’m home, we’re going to take the family plane for a day trip up to Bentonville, Arkansas to see the brand new Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, and we may take a day trip over to New Orleans as well. One of the advantages of having a family plane is that it makes quick trips like this quite easy!

4. Marc and I have been working with a group of Georgetown University students who are doing a documentary on reenactors and the culture of the hobby, with a focus on motivations and the connections that reenactors have to history. It’s a pretty cool project. They talked with me for a good 3 hours about 6 weeks ago, and then about 3 weeks ago, they interviewed both Marc and I on camera, and also filmed us as we talked a bit about some of our equipment. They want to accompany us to an event in January and also to film us as we prepare for an event. It’s pretty fun, though it’s weird for me to be on the other side of the camera for once!

5. Work is coming along quickly on the new sites, and I’m already near launch for the redone Historically Speaking site. Next will be Traveling Tomboy, followed by my photography blog, then my personal blog, and then, finally, a redo of my landing page. The work is tedious, but because it’s broken up blog by blog, it is much more manageable than trying to redo my entire site at once.

6. I’ve been subbing for a high school art teacher all week, which has been pretty awesome. I mostly just sit back because there are two student teachers who are in training and who run the class. I occasionally advise students on their work, or help kids who are doing stuff in Photoshop and so it’s nice to be able to actually help the students with something I know, for once. It’s also cool because the kids are much better behaved than my average students, and the teacher has set up an audio jack that goes to the classroom speakers, so I get to play music for my students. It helps the kids relax and it creates a very “chill” environment that tends to smooth over the rough edges that many of my students have. I wish I could play music in all of the classes I sub for.

Life is definitely pretty good right now. I’m getting more subbing work, I’ve gotten a couple offers for design work, I’ve gotten some photography work, I’ve gotten my blogging situation worked out, and I’m about to take some trips. I am holding off on blogging here much because I don’t want to have additional content to import over to my new blog locations, but I should have them up and running soon, with great new content, so keep your eyes peeled for announcements!

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Categories: Blogging Daily Life Hobbies Personal Teaching Work
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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Features from the different Blogs





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I’m in need of a few good taglines!

Now that I’m finally going to be able to differentiate my various blogs here at Driftingfocus, I’ve started giving some thought as to what I want each of them to look and feel like. Right now my various blogs have titles, but I am a big fan of taglines as well, and want to integrate that into the new designs. There’s one problem: while I’m good at coming up with blog names, I am utterly terrible at coming up with taglines.

Read More

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Further Evolution for Driftingfocus.com

Ever since I moved and restructured my previous blog into several topic-specific blogs under one site-heading, I have been bothered by the fact that the blogs, while separate, were visually the same and that the look worked for some topics, not others. I wanted to be able to have different looks, different themes even, but that usually means having different WordPress installs, which means having separate sites. I worked so hard to bring all my different blogs under one domain, so that seemed to be counterproductive.

But lo, I have found a solution! I recently found a plugin called WP Theme Switcher+ (affiliate link) which allows me to have different themes for different pages, categories, etc. This way, each of the blogs here can have its own look and formatting that suit it best, while maintaining the same structure and the look of the front landing page.

I looked at the plugin’s coding and my own site’s coding, and I think that I can make it work. It will mean a degree of reformatting for the blogs that will have separate looks (mainly my reenacting blog and photography blog, to start with), but that also means that any re-editing of old work will be broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

This change will be gradual and may not even take place until mid-winter, but I think that it will help differentiate the blogs here on Driftingfocus.com while still maintaining all of my writing and photography under one site and domain. I can find or design themes which better suit each of my subject-specific blogs, while keeping the overall landing page the same.

What do you all think?

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