My blog has been around since 2006 and has gone through many redesigns since. But the last design was created in 2012 and hasn’t been updated since. Although it looked a bit dated, I had no reason to change it because I liked it and didn’t blog as much as I used to.

But due to the ever changing nature of the web, I finally hit a stumbling block. My theme would no longer work with newer versions of PHP, and the WordPress plugins that I relied on to keep it running were constantly breaking with updates too. Last year, my web host had kindly allowed me to run an outdated version of PHP so that I could keep my blog running but over the past weekend, they suddenly upgraded to the latest version with no warning and broke my site.

I’m too tired/lazy to do a complete site re-haul and redesign, so I found a new WordPress theme I could work with and updated my site over the past few days:

I’m still working on a few little things to make the site look a bit more coherent, but take a look and let me know what you think. A lot of things were brought over from the old design, like the tabbed sidebar. There are a lot more fancy effects with this new theme and I’m still playing around with some of them. I’m also still learning all the little nuances of this theme so I can tailor it more to my liking.

I have to admit that I still liked my old design slightly better, despite it looking outdated. Perhaps it’s because I worked so hard on it? If that’s the case, I may end up liking this theme more as I continue to work on it.

Nonetheless, it has been an exciting few days — first, to find that my blog was broken, then, to try to fix the problem (it wasn’t easy because I actually had to restore a lot of data from backups), and then, design a new site at the end. But now that the bulk of the work is done, I can breathe easier and work on the little stuff.