It’s been exactly two weeks since I did a refresh of the blog, so I thought I’d post a quick status update.

The Theme

I’m loving the new theme, Pocket. The layout is clean and easy to read and I find myself reviewing the entries on the blog in WordPress instead of just plain text.

The Pocket theme supports the “Featured Image” feature of WordPress and its taking a bit of trial and error to get comfortable with the way the responsive design handles this image. Moving from the 11″ MacBook Air to the 27″ iMac helps vary my perspecitive and try to find a good middle ground.

In the footer I streamlined my widgets down to three: Twitter, Flickr and Elsewhere. Originally I had Instagram as my photo widget, but I find myself using Flickr more now that they have a new iPhone app.

My Tools

I seem to be moving more toward using WriteRoom, instead of my ususal MarsEdit mostly becuase of the DropBox support. Having the ability to start a post at work and then pickup where I left off when I get home is big time fun.

I’m also leaning more and more towards Markdown when composing my blog posts. In the past I’ve always used simple HTML, but I like the way Markdown handles links and it makes it much easier to read in plain text.

With my current workflow, I write everything in Writeroom and do all my proof-reading there as well. The final stage is to copy and paste it into WordPress and do I final review and add the featured image.

The Results

Ultimately it’s about the writing. Having a new theme, or widget is really nothing more than packaging. If I’m to judge the results of all the changes I’ve made, it has to be based on what’s been written.

4 entries and over 3,800 words.

Clearly facelift has encouraged me to write more, which is a very good thing. I haven’t been excercising my writing muscle beyond e-mails and proposals and I had feared it had atrophied. Granted, all of my entries have been technical in nature, but it’s a step in the right direction and I’m pleased with my progress thus far.

I’m currently writing a multi-part series on mechanical keyboards, which starts here. I don’t have it all planned out and I don’t know where it will end, but I’m loving the process.