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!