A new look

On a day of record temperatures, and the promise of even higher levels tomorrow, it’s been a day of staying indoors, with the windows open and the curtains closed, in an attempt to keep cool. I did venture out for a short walk, first thing this morning, before the mercury climbed too high, but traffic levels were considerably down from what they normally have been at 9am on a Monday morning,

I only walked as far as the post box, at the end of the next road, but it was sufficient to bring me out in a sweat. I have been walking as much as possible, following my discharge from hospital to both aid my recovery and restore fitness levels to where they were, before surgery, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s only a fortnight ago that I hiked those nine miles along the North Downs Way.

On the other hand, it’s only a week since the operation, and with each passing day I am feeling that little bit better, and that extra bit stronger. My final thought, before getting on to the main topic of this post, is how grateful I am that the procedure took place last Monday, rather than today!

The topic, which should be immediately apparent to regular readers of the blog, is the new, simplified and quite pastoral theme I have adopted. Better laid out, easier to read as well as easy on the eye, It’s been more than a few years since I last tinkered with the appearance of the blog, and as anyone who has followed these pages since the beginning (14 years ago) will know, I have experimented with a number of different themes and layouts over the years.

Blogger – Google’s dedicated blogging platform, make it incredibly easy to make these changes, and in fact they are all achieved at the click of the mouse. What’s more, you can “try before you buy,” so to speak, except there’s no buying involved, and if for any reason, you are not happy with your choice, you can either revert back to the previous theme, or try again with a different one.

Of course, there are choices of different themes on other blogging platforms, such as WordPress, and this applies to both the more popular WordPress.com version and the self-hosted WordPress.org variant. I know this from the experience I had with my now defunct, Paul’s Beer Travels website, but with the latter there were probably far too many options, and too much choice isn’t always a good thing.

Somewhat ironically, Bluehost – the company I chose to host my website, emailed me today with an offer to have “my site built by a pro.” Under different circumstances, such as having significantly more free time, I might be tempted to explore their offer, but the wisest course would be to “park” their offer, and come back to it, should things change in the future.

That’s it then, for the time being  at least, but do let me know what you think of the “new look” blog.