• blogging,  writing/reading

    This Theme’s New Look

    One of the sculptures at Benson Sculpture Gardens

    If you visit here often you will notice visual changes to this blog. I have changed the name of this blog from Monte Stevens Photography Blog to Monte Stevens Blog. I am still using the same free theme, Savona Edge by Optima Themes, but made a few tweaks to it. I have gone back to the theme’s original fonts. That way, I get rid of the Fonts Plugin. I am liking it so far but I could still add the plugin later. I have also removed the right sidebar so that blogging is more the focus. I blog because I wish to share my images and words for the joy I receive from that experience and not my ego. I now have a dropdown menu located in the footer for Categories, Archives, and giving the reader the ability of subscribing to notifications of new posts, it that interests you. Be aware you will get an email each time I post which could be 20-25 days a month. The Blogroll that was located in the sidebar is now on the main menu at the top which loads up a page of blogs I follow and websites I have interests in. You can check them out if you’re bored or can’t go to sleep or want to see if you’re listed.

    If you do take a look at my Archives menu you will find my blog posts from 2009-2011 do not have images attached. And, this could be true of any post due to the import process. When I exported those posts I failed to also export the media. So I’ve imported the blog posts without them and will add the files later when the snow is falling and it’s too cold to be outside or I just say to heck with them. I’m not sure they are that important to anyone but me as I’m finding I actually am enjoying the process of looking back over those old posts.

    Please let me know what you think of the new look and if you find any issues.

  • blogging,  leaves

    More about the changes…

    It’s the season of changes

    One of the changes I’m making to this blog is having it hosted by WordPress.com. I was having issues with my previous hosting service. At one time this past year I could not even log on to my dashboard. After a chat session they got me back up and running. I have no idea what they did.  Shortly after that more issues began appearing and in another chat session they claimed that I was running out of storage space. I was told my storage space was consuming 57Gb, so I upgraded. Yet, I continued to have troubles. So, I exported my entire blog and began to play around with the free WordPress.com. For the heck of it I imported that .xml file onto a free WordPress.com site that has a storage capacity of 1Gb. It all fit! At the present time all my posts and media from 2009 to the present, except for a few media files and I will explain that later, are on WordPress.com hosting service and I’m only using 790Mb of the 1Gb. So, I have purchased their personal plan which gives me 6Gb of storage and I’m transfering my domain over to WordPress.com. Hopefully you will read this after that transfer.

  • shadows,  Software

    Here we go again…

    Solar eclipse shadows outside my condo.

    Well here’s another theme made by the same developer, Optima, called Savona. It has a few of the things that I could not get to work on the Graceful theme. It very much looks like Graceful and my older theme. It is clean and uses more of the screen. It also defaults to a white background, which I want.

    My primary concern for this website is simplicity so I’ve decided to eliminate the featured image as it does not have the lightbox function. I do not see where that can be added except through code and I’m not going there. 

    The only way I can get an image on the blog post page is with full content instead of excerpt. When I choose an excerpt it displays 50 characters of the post but not an image. With full context on this allows the image to be on the blog post page and the full article to be read. This way my millions of readers can read my content without going to the continue reading link. This is true on both these themes. I have also enlarged the image just a bit.

    This theme also shows the number of comments on the blog post page, which Graceful did not show. Anyway, here is another theme and hoping you will see what I don’t and let me know. Hope you had a good Saturday.