How to use this Page

I am tidying up here because it is just starting to feel like Autumn and I was looking at a friend’s website and realizing that not only was their About page out of date, it had them living in the wrong country. Now, for a lot of people a personal website is basically just that, personal. For me since I sometimes solicit or receive work through librarian.net I figured I’d maybe do a little tidying, look professional, that sort of thing. So I updated my about page, am reading through the FAQ, made sure WordPress was up to date and updated my plugins. I also disabled the theme switcher which was a fun thing when I wanted to have four different looking versions of this site, but I’m not feeling that way any more. Apologies to people who enjoyed the other themes. Next on the to do list is getting my Talks page a little more streamlined. I don’t think it has to be an eight year list of talks I’ve given and it’s not really sending the message I want.

So, just a little inward-facing user experience stuff and a reminder that to many people our web presence is an awful lot of what they know about us. May want to make sure it’s looking okay. Otherwise I’m trying to relax in the spirit of the Virgo Month of Leisure and get ready for my teaching and drop-in time to start which is happening next week. The cooler winds are starting to blow in and I am ready to start hunkering down.

This is a little update to what I’ve been doing in the past months involving art, WordPress,  coding and life in general. There’s a few links to useful things I’ve found recently as well.

I now have a new part time job which I am enjoying very much: it’s easily the best job I’ve ever had, and am also in the process of getting ready to move to another area of the country to be with my fiancé. Lets just say life is looking a lot better than it was 2 years ago. I may write a post/essay on that one day if I have nothing better to do with my time (perhaps not then).

I took up my martial arts and yoga again over the past 2 years and sorted a few things out with my confidence and fitness in general which hopefully will one day reflect on my artwork. I can nearly kick my head again, but not quite.

I’ve also been working since last year on a WordPress CMS website project and a picture book project to keep my skills up and learn new things. I will go into more detail as the projects develop later in the year.

Here’s a few useful things I found on the inter-web recently for you as you’ve read this far:

Useful WordPress plugins

PHPEnkoder (automatically encrypts emails on web page to stop email spam)

WP-Cycle (J Query image slide show)

Members (I’m keeping my eye on this one, looks very promising for user management)

Free Software

Backup tool, FreeFileSync (useful for flash drives and secondary hard drive backup)

Password manager, KeePass