A Life Surfeited

I chose the name of my blog with the intent to showcase the activity that fills my life with joy: travel. The past few weeks, however, it has applied more (unforgivingly) to the massive amount of work, homework, and just plain ole life on my plate. Juggling it all, but especially the creation of my final project, has been a lesson in patience and prioritizing. But like with most challenges, I have made it through and am now ready to start planning my next reprieve… a trip to SoCal!

I finally got my website up and running after way too many hours of googling fixes, installing, uninstalling, uploading, compressing, downloading, deleting, transferring, renaming, plugging in, unplugging, signing in, signing out, caching… you get the idea. I ended up having to add a plugin to my local WP site that copied everything and duplicated it on my live WP site (and somehow/somewhere saved it to a database.) I’m still unclear how to maintain the site, which I plan to do, but like everything else, will figure it out. I know we aren’t supposed to make changes to the live site, but just seems SO much easier for a personal blog (not a client site.) But I do want to follow best practices if I can figure out a relatively easy way to copy and duplicate going forward.

There are still many modifications I would like to make to my site, as well as content to be added – again, I plan to actually use and update my site going forward. But for now, I am happy with what I was able to accomplish.

I made quite a few style changes to the parent theme using a child theme, but also through the WP customization tool. A few things I want to do but was unable, after several searches and failed attempts, include:

• Making the header menu background color (black) run the full length of the page. Right now it is cut up with a gray background. It has something to do with the layers on the page… a site container under another site container, with a row and a banner and a menu in between or over. So if I change one that may fix the header problem, if affects other parts of the page.
• Make the text in the site container in the banner image more opaque without making the entire page (site container) opaque. Same issue with layering above.

I also modified three plugins to suit my needs: a Google calendar, a world map, and custom comment fields.

• I am still working on the Google calendar – I have done every step the plugin says, i.e. created the cal, linked to my public Google cal, accessed an API key, but it still won’t display the “events.”
• I am happy with the world map, as it links to associated posts, but I would like to continue playing with it’s styling.
• As for the comment fields, I was able to create 2 new fields. One thing I still can’t figure out though is how to remove the WP default field for “Website.” It only shows for users not signed in, but still… I don’t want or need it.

Another thing I’d like to do in the future is make the information/links I have on my Day Dreams page, under the calendar, look like a Pinterest page. I think I will be able to do this, just need to find the right plugin.

Two last thoughts: I didn’t utilize widgets for my final project but would be interested in learning more about them and how I could. Also, I may decide to make a custom post type for my travel posts that include dates of the trip and location (instead of me having to remember to write that in each time.)

So yea, I think that’s it! Way to go everyone! We did it! I look forward to seeing everyone’s blogs this week in class:)

Cheers,

Jane