It’s been another year, and I’ve made some updates to 19th Step.

It’s been a few years now since I was really posting on a regular basis and I attribute that to spending less time traveling and having more outlets for my thoughts and ideas – but it remains a great place to dump my thoughts or drop a note about what I’m working on.

In the past 3 months I’ve been doing a lot of WordPress design and development, modifying themes and setting up new sites. A few (Disco Death, Chengdu Living) of them are online, but the bulk are still in production. I’m looking forward to releasing those and in the meantime I’m having a great time learning more and refining my skills. It’s nice to know that web development has gone in such a modular direction, it’s far less of a headache than it was 5+ years ago because powerful, flexible, and straight forward content systems like WordPress and Joomla have really blossomed.

Having full control over the things that I’m working on is also a luxury that I appreciate each and every single day.

Over the last two days, here are some of the changes I’ve made:

  1. Changed background, link, and title colors, added a tiled background image
  2. Added an RSS banner at the top and delegated the feed to Feedburner
  3. Enabled comments, avatars which work through Gravatar, and added “Leave a comment” link to each post
  4. Found the right combination of 14 plugins, like WPtouch, which makes the site look pretty on an iPhone or iPod Touch
  5. Trimmed down the categories. I deleted almost 10 categories that had fewer than 10 posts and assigned the relevant tags to those posts.
  6. Tagging previous posts. This is a work in progress but I’ve started the process of tagging over 5 years of posts!
  7. Added links to Chengdu Living, Disco Death, and Just Charlie to the sidebar
  8. Added a tag cloud to the sidebar. This will become more useful when the bulk of the posts are tagged
  9. Removed my e-mail address and social network links, and replaced them with a simple contact form.

Nothing left to add to this site except content!