Spring Cleaning

Jenn and I spent most of the morning digging up our backyard, attempting to get it ready as McKinney’s number one bird attraction. Now that the soil is turned over and my arms are only 50% jelly from trying to wrestle the beastly gas-powered tiller, I took the rest of today to finish up the outstanding tasks on this website.

If you’re reading this post at my actual site (versus my RSS feed), you can plainly see that I’ve been quite busy. One of my new year’s resolutions was acknowledging that my own web design skills are a little outdated. So instead of trying to wrestle my own theme together, I co-opted a wonderful Rob Goodlatte theme and adapted it to my own needs. Thanks a million times to Rob for putting his Abstractia theme into the public domain.

For the nerds out there, my WordPress installation is finally up-to-date, allowing me to take advantage of some nifty new features — along with some swell security updates. Because I was so behind on version numbers, a significant rework of my site’s custom code was needed. Waddling, spit, and twine were exchanged for proper PHP classes and methods, allowing my code to be future-proof and portable. This means if anyone wants to publish their own online book like I’m doing here, let me know and I can get you setup, as my custom code is now encapsulated within a custom WordPress plugin. And just in time for the upcoming Wordcamp conference, where I hope the people I meet will help me learn more about this wonderful technology.