It’s funny how things happen, isn’t it? The other night one of my regular subscribers emailed me and said, “Hey, Phil, what’s wrong with the site, it’s all over the place?” I checked and he was right; graphics all wrong, text the wrong colour and the header was missing entirely. D’oh!
So I flashed off a text to my WordPress guru, the amazing Chris Mundy and let him know, asking him if he could have a look for me when he got time. About 20 minutes later I got a phone call. Um, yes, the site was broken, no risk. Apparently there is a software package called Genesis that controls the themes used by WordPress. It governs layout, graphics, columns and the general look and feel of the site. I had noted when I looked at it myself that a banner came up on the page telling me that Genesis had been updated so I sorta figured that it might have been the problem. It was.
“Well, while we’re at it, do you think it’s time we updated the site anyway?” Chris asked. I agreed that a new look would be nice and hastened to add that I wasn’t in a hurry because I knew how busy he was. “Oh, well, that’s not a problem, you see. I’m on holidays at the moment and this would be an ideal time to do it.”
Bottom line. 40 minutes later we had chosen a theme, applied it and decided on layout. I had sent Chris a high resolution copy of the picture for the header and, the next morning, the site was completely revised and had gone live during the night. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if every person that you had to deal with did their job as well as Chris does?
Speaking of the picture. It is one of my all-time favourite shots for a number of reasons. I have wanted to use it for a number of years but, due to its size I had been unable to. It was taken by my son while we were crossing the Seacliff Bridge on the coast road north of Wollongong. It was about 2006, if I recall. I was riding my old red VFR and Graeme was hanging on for dear life with his knees on the pillion seat while he managed the camera to take a series of shots, this one being the best of them. But the coolest thing about it is that it was taken with a 35 year old Pentax SP1000 FILM camera, the very same camera that I had used to take all my road racing photos back in the day. Scanned and tidied up in Photoshop, it is a spectacular image and shows the bridge and surroundings to its best.
So, have a look and let me know what you think. If there’s anything that doesn’t work, let me know also, or if there is something that you’d like to add, do that too. I should add that the theme that I am using now is “mobile sensitive” meaning that it resizes itself depending on the size of the screen on which it is being viewed so it looks equally as good on a little mobile phone screen as it does on a full-sized monitor.
Not much happening bike-wise still. Ducati release details of their 2013 MotoGp bike tomorrow but I think that might be more rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic than anything else.
My good mate who had organised a lift for me and my bike to the Island Classic at the end of the month contacted me this week to say that the guy from whom he was hiring the trailer has converted it from a three-bike layout to a two-bike one so there isn’t any room for the Shadowfax so I am again looking for a spot on someone’s trailer. I’m not panicking at this stage, I’m sure something will turn up.
Have a good day. 🙂 I thought this was pretty funny.