Tidying up the website

Back in September and October of last year (2020) I considered moving my blog/website to another hosting service. Long story short, I stayed with WordPress. But I spent some time making the site look better (well at least different) by changing to a theme that supports blog post summaries.

The menus in the new theme can be nested. I’ve created a page for my favorite pictures from each of the Sony cameras I have owned. With nested menus (on the upper left of the page) I created a high level menu called “Camera Samples” (go ahead, look up there) with a submenu for each of the cameras.

One of the main organizing principles of my blog is categories. The theme I use also has a nesting feature for categories (a bit lower on the left, under the “Subscribe” button). I thought “Hey, I could nest star rating submenus under my Cooking and Reading categories!”

I often rate recipes I’ve made and books I’ve read using a 5 star system. In practice it’s really a 3 star system where 0 stars would mean “NO”, 1 star would be “Will cook again”, 2 stars would be “Very nice, let’s make this for friends”, and 3 stars would be “Cream of the crop.” But, tradition has 5 star rating systems; I mean who would think to look for 2 star recipes thinking they’d be any good. So, I use the 5 star system.

Over the years I’ve been in and out on rating recipes and I used different terminology to stars given. So, I went through almost each of the 200+ cooking posts to assign a standard star rating and update the categories to as well. My reading posts were a bit more standardized but I went through them as well.

I also purged some categories and moved travel related categories under “Travel”.

Finally, the theme I use has a defect in displaying image captions; they are indistinguishable from plain text. WordPress support was great in helping me fix that by showing me how to add some additional CSS code to my site.

I hope the changes makes reading and navigating my website easier. Let me know what you think.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.