The New Is There Food - Categories

What started as a redesign of the site - another theme change - has resulted in something a little more extensive: a full on restructuring.

The categories have changed again. They didn’t really fit with the things I want to do with the site so they’ve been jiggled around. Before, I had:

Reviews - too broad. TV, film, music, games; it all ends up in here.

Site Specific - Not used all that often, and sometimes ended up being tech posts about new Wordpress updates.

Distractions - hasn’t been used for ages.

Thoughts - I was finding that everything really ended up in here. After all, what’s a blog’s content made up of if it’s not thoughts?

So, after some careful thought, and a look at my archives, we now have:

Personal - I intend to write some more personal things for the site. These wouldn’t have fit in any of the other categories.

Health - My gym updates (which I’ll admit have slowed a little, of late) will go in here. Light-hearted posts about my current state of well-being will probably also go here.

Tech - I tried to start a second tech blog, but that failed miserably. It makes no sense to try to write two blogs when I’m neglecting my “primary” blog. So tech will stay on Is There Food, and I’ll try to keep up to date with all the Apple stuff I used to post about.

Entertainment - And this is where everything else lives. Films, TV, games, music: it’s all going to sit inside the entertainment category.

Beyond that, I’m going to make better use of tags. If I write a review of a game, I’ll try to make sure it’s got the right tags on (”review” and “game”).

Using this approach, the site should make a bit more sense, and I can compartmentalise my posts better.

The New Is There Food - Theme

Is There Food is now powered by a customised version of Arun Kale’s great The Morning After theme.

I’ve chopped and changed things a bit, and implemented a number of tweaks, but without Arun’s great initial work I don’t think I’d have been anywhere near as pleased with the end result as I am.

New features include:

No more “blog” view - categories are now very much segmented on the front page. This makes sense to me: why include a post about my gym progress with a review of a horror film.

Better use of tags/categories - the front page includes links to the four key categories on the site, as well as quick links to the most commonly used tags.

Viewing Log page - The magnificent WP Movie Ratings plugin is being used to its fullest and is powering my Viewing Log page.

Two column post view - it’s now easier to read posts, and there’s less wasted space.

Amazon recommendations - I’ll try to keep this up to date. Buy stuff from this list is you like the site and it’ll contribute to its upkeep.

Category specific banners - Each section of the site is undifferentiated from the others by the use of a different banner image. The classic Is There Food banner is used in the Personal section. (coming soon)

There’s probably more, but I’ve spent so long tweaking and adjusting that I can’t remember.

I hope you like the new look, and I look forward to making the most of it in the future, and increasing the amount of content that appears on the site.

I’m still tweaking bits and pieces, but wanted to get the site launched otherwise I’d never do it!

Normal Service…

…will be resumed shortly.

Apologies for the lack of updates over the last couple of weeks; things have been busy.

I’ve got a raft of updates coming soon; I’ll be introducing a review feed so you don’t have to see rubbish like this appearing in your RSS reader of choice. I’m also planning to make it easier to find the RSS link (it’s over there…on the right…down a bit…got it!), and to provide an explanation of RSS for those that perhaps haven’t yet been introduced to its wonders.

In terms of reviews, I’ve got Chocolate and Incident On And Of A Mountain Road from the Masters of Horror series, X-Men 3, and I’ve even suffered the horrors of Andre The Butcher, so you don’t have to. I’ve got two Doctor Who reviews coming, and hopefully a third after tonight. And to top it all off I’m going to a preview showing of Hard Candy on Monday, so that’ll be up asap too.

So, much to come - just bear with me while I sort all this tedious work stuff out and things will be back on track before you know it.

Site tweaks

I’ve made a couple of noteworthy changes to the site:

• The Amazon icons have been removed from the sidebar. I quite like them but they were causing the site to take an age to load. I’m not sure why. I might do some experimenting at some point to see if I can figure out what’s wrong, but for now they’ve been removed.
• I’ve added a “notify me” checkbox on comments. This is checked by default, and should mean you’ll get an email if someone replies to a comment you’ve posted. If you don’t want to know, uncheck it.
• I’ve also upgraded to the latest, bleeding-edge version of Wordpress. If anything looks odd, or goes horribly wrong, please contact me via the comments of contact form. So far (and I’ve been running this for a few days now) things appear to be fine.

Host move

I'm moving the site to another host I've moved the site to another host to try to resolve a couple of issues I'm currently having with it. Hopefully this should result in a bit of a speed increase too.

Please hold tight - the ride shouldn't be that bumpy, but you are advised to keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. See you on the other side…

…right: move done. If you're reading this then your ISP's DNS servers have picked up my new location and all is well. If you're not reading this, I can say whatever I like about you…

My new host is A Small Orange. Time will tell how well equipped this miraculous fruit is and whether it's up to the job, but their staff are second to none. The support experience so far has been an absolute wonder, and if the hosting is half as good as the support, things will be fine. 

Testing, testing…

This is a test post using my MDA Vario and Pocket SharpMT. With a bit of luck, this will appear as a draft, but you never know…

Edit: Indeed, you really never know. This posted as a published article, rather than a draft; worth keeping in mind. Other than that Pocket SharpMT doesn't look too bad: It certainly has everything you need to post articles from your Pocket PC based phone, even if it does feel a little bit clunky (but then to be fair, so do an awful lot of mobile apps). From what I can see though, it corners the market - I know of no other Windows Mobile blogging client.