Greetings from home base in Thailand!

The site is coming along nicely – we have been putting in crazy amounts of time upgrading across the board and improving the look and feel of the entire website. Now 9 of the 10 header titles are finally all in WordPress with just the Links running on its own platform. We started this conversion project in March of 2012. Its been well over a year – and we are seeing good progress on this.

What was among the biggest projects we tackled in 16 years of running this site was to convert over 5000+ travel photos, their respective galleries and descriptions into Nextgen plugin and a number of its respective sub plugins. Today, (3/20/13) we placed the photo gallery live. Now you can pin photos across the site and in the future, will be able to vote, add comments, send as postcards and many more options. A big part of this conversion was the acquisition of “user” accounts where you will can now upload your own galleries.

And here are examples of galleries that we can create with the new system:
Classic Gallery: http://www.davestravelcorner.com/outstanding/
The Modern Eye Gallery: http://www.davestravelcorner.com/the-modern-eye/

We are very bummed that Studio Press’s back country theme is *still* not responsive – we may switch themes at some point. A theme these days absolutely must be responsive. Its been months of waiting and some of their other themes are being upgraded slowly.

Our annual travel writing contest is currently running and we setup a nifty user account registration system so a login and a password now allows one to submit their entries and tie user profiles into any content pieces they have submitted to this site. This will also be good for our established writers – making it easier and simpler to post and process new pieces to the site.

We just added Pinterest “pin it” icon to all larger photos across the site and implemented the awesome Foobox lightboxes (one of the best lightboxes we’ve seen). We spent significant research looking into what is available on the market today and they are one of the leaders in this category. Now all galleries or photos on the site that you can click on will show the Foobox.

Most of the 3rd party widgets have now been replaced on the site with in house hosted ones – still need to find a good audio/podcast plugin solution. Low priority now but its on the list.

There are many miscellaneous projects as well. Over time you learn that the less content hosted elsewhere, widgets or otherwise is a good way to go. All in due time!

~ Dave