Welcome to Canada, and Other Goings On

It took a lot of heavy lifting and entailed a fair amount of wheel-spinning but I finally got my web sites fully moved from OLM and Digital Ocean to OVH in Montreal. I posted about this earlier but later found I was premature in declaring the battle of OVH to be over. I question why I even bother with this stuff any more. The more work I put into my web presence the less I get in return, to a point where I see virtually nothing to show for the hours I’ve poured into the heavy lifting and code detail. It’s like I am digging a hole that’s gotten so deep that the only place left for the dirt I’m shoveling to land is on my head.

Nevertheless having successfully moved the sites over has allowed me to return to creative pursuits, and specifically to revisit a project I came up with a couple of months ago. Over a year ago I bought a lifetime membership license for all of the 87 “Elegant Themes” and accompanying plugins. I’ve intended to fill every one of those themes with content to demonstrate how they function in a real world environment, and include what amounts to product reviews of each theme in the process. The endeavor serves many purposes. Encouraging me to do more writing is high among them. Getting my money’s worth out of the lifetime membership expense is also part of the intent, though getting myself into writing and sharing my photography is more important. Empty themes present vessels into which content is poured, and each new environment seems to inspire something different. The same is true of content management systems. If I ever give up on the themes pursuit I might look at filling each of the widely used CMSes with content in a similar spirit. I have more than enough content to fill 87 themes, though a full CMS presents more of a bottomless beast to fill.

I spent some time filling Elegant Themes’ Aggregate theme with content. Aggregate is intended to serve as a vessel for news or magazine type content. I was not sold on it at first but after stuffing it with 8 posts and a few pages I find it’s actually pretty sharp. Or maybe that’s just my content making it look good. Hah. I may not be fully done with this theme yet but I also feel I am ready to move to the next one. Here is how it looks.