This has been a long time coming, but I’ve finally gotten everything set up and transferred a good portion my internet presence to this new website. This is the home for now of any writing, etc I do. This means you can ignore the old, ugly blog from now on.  If you subscribe to my posts through RSS, you will also need to update your feed.

The Name

I spent days of intense meditation looking for the perfect name for the new site. After three days of no sleep or food, an idea came to me: just give up and just pick something. So I settled on “Shuttlebum.” The name is sort of a reference to a term I picked up from one of my favorite Sci-fi books: Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany. Shuttle-bums are basically uneducated people who work on ships that fly around the galaxy. I feel like that’s a decent metaphor for my excursions here. 

The Design

Details:

• Wordpress custom theme built from the standard “classic” theme.
• All images are original with the exception of the social media icons on the About page.
• Hosted by BlueHost. We’ll see how that goes.
• Disclaimer: the code still needs to be cleaned up a bit. Also I suck at PHP..
• This site is best viewed using a real browser (i.e. not IE7 or below).
• Search doesn’t work yet.

The new design is marginally better than the blogger template I was using before (it’s more colorful at the very least). I am interested to hear feedback on it if you feel so inclined. I’m not totally happy with the design overall but I needed something to throw up. I intend to keep working on this and other designs mostly just to practice. The fact that I am content enough to actually make it public says quite a bit about my satisfaction, but you’ll find I’ll criticize more than I’ll praise.  I was going to post a summary of my thoughts on the design, but I think I’ll hold off on that until people have had a chance to see it. I will post my impressions in a few days, but in the meantime I encourage you to tear it apart in the comments . (bug reports are also welcome, either in comment for or through e-mail).

There are a few things I have left to do, including styling the footer, comment areas, and post content a little bit more. These should hopefully get done incrementally over the next few weeks but I wanted to get this up now or I’d be tweaking it forever.

Since I have been working pretty steadily on the development for this over the last week or so, I haven’t had a chance to write any new posts. Look for the European Chronicles to continue shortly.