And suddenly, it’s 2012! How long has it been since my last update? Let’s see… Oh, only 3 months. I’ve done worse. What can I say, I’m a crappy blogger. I should’ve stuck to posting stupid links to my blog instead of trying to be all deep and thoughtful and write journally entries that no one gives a crap about. Even I don’t give a crap. But why am I writing this? Um, out of guilt, I guess? The two or three people who are still reading this blog deserve to find something new here every once in a while.

So, since this is my first post of 2012, I should probably write about the highlights of 2011. Well, I became a full-fledged Canadian citizen in March and voted in my first federal election in May. Sadly the Conservatives won a majority government this time. And later in the provincial election, the Conservatives won in our riding so now we’re represented by a Tory in the parliament. Sigh. PEOPLE, Y U NO VOTE?!?

In June, we made it to Newfoundland and back. Did a fair amount of hiking, ate a lot of fish. I even had a moose burger once (good but kind of dry) as well as iceberg tea (iced tea with chunks of iceberg in it). I found out that iceberg doesn’t melt very quickly in your mouth (it’s so dense). It was an amazing trip with a lot of moose and some iceberg sightings. Words can’t do it justice. Go there if you can! Don’t wait until you’re old and retired and not fit enough to do a lot of hiking! I would love to go back there again someday.

Right after the trip to Newfoundland, we took up a new hobby, which is geocaching. Soon I decided that I prefer hiding geocaches to trying to find them because I’m not a big fan of beating around the bush. When we go geocaching, I usually just observe the area around the ground zero and try to figure out where the geocache would be with my mind’s eye. If there are bushes to beat around, I’ll just summon Troy to do the dirty work. Yes, I’m a princess. But Troy actually enjoys beating around the bush so I don’t feel too bad about it.

And the last but not the least highlight is, I finally got an Etsy shop up and running. Not only that, I even got people buying the stuff I was selling! Craziness! I’d thought it would never happen! I sell vintage cameras (mostly Polaroids) and expired film on Etsy. It’s enjoyable. I like selling stuff that I actually care about and getting to meet customers who love cameras and film photography as much as I do, if not more. Having a shop also makes our weekend thrifting rounds more exciting because I have something specific to find as opposed to just thrifting for whatever, and when I do find cool cameras, I just can’t wait to list them at my shop. Except, of course, I have to procrastinate and now I have a big pile of cameras waiting to be listed. Such is my life.

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After trying on more WordPress themes than I care to admit, I decided to settle with the Typominima theme. Granted that I had to add a bunch of features and modified a bunch of things to it to fit my need, but I liked the bold typography and the layout so much, I didn’t mind having to do some extra work. In fact, I quite enjoyed the extra work as it helped me learn the inner working of WordPress. So much so that I think I’m ready to tackle my next project, which is to create a WordPress theme from scratch.

Here’s a list of modifications and additions I did to the theme that I could remember:

1. Moved the search bar and subscription link from the top of the page to above the footer, just because I thought they looked out of place up there.
2. Changed the markup of the blog title from div to H1 for better SEO.
3. Changed the web font replacement service from Cufon (Typo Slab Serif) to Google Web Fonts (Vidaloka), mostly because I wasn’t sure of the search engine-friendliness of Cufon.
4. Changed the colour scheme. I’ve always been a fan of “black and white and red all over.”
5. Made threaded comment work with the theme. Kind of.
6. Added “Edit” link to posts and comments.
7. Added “Reply” link to comments.
8. Added next and previous post navigation links to every post.

Um, what else? I’m sure there are more. I just can’t remember. Or maybe it just feels like there should be more because it took me two days worth of tinkering before I’m close to being happy with it.

One thing I would still like to do is add a comment link to the bottom of every post on the main page, which I already know how to do, but I don’t want it to show on main page posts with a “Read More” link. I don’t know if that sentence makes any sense, but if it does to you, and you know where I can find the script, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know. Also any feedback as to readability and browser compatibility would be much appreciated.

On a sort of related note, the importer script I used to migrate the posts from Movable Type to WordPress didn’t translate the Markdown markups on the original posts (I had Markdown on by default on Movable Type) on import so some of the posts are still looking pretty ugly, but I’m gradually rendering the markups, one post at a time. Hopefully they’ll all be looking pretty in, say, 3 years from now. Heh.