Been and Gone and Come Back Again

Sauce

Two months. Nine weeks. Or sixty-three days. That's how long it has been since I last posted on Steem. Why? Life. If you take a look at my last post, we had a family emergency with my son. All is good with him now, but it threw us for a loop. Between spending time on Steem and helping to run

@thewritersblock, I had to take a step back for the family's sake. Something had to give, so I made that something Steem. Then, to top it all, I suffered with my health in the lead up to Christmas and throughout. So rather than just concentrate on my writer's community, I was forced to concentrate on me. Thankfully the team we have at The Writers' Block is awesome, had my back, and has kept things ticking over nicely.

These past few weeks I have delved deep into Wordpress design and development: it has long been an idea at The Writers' Block to create a literary journal to showcase the very best fiction put out from this community. It was to be integrated with the blockchain with the hopes of eventually releasing our own token to reward authors. Our first dev couldn't realize our vision, so we had to go back to the drawing board. Thankfully we have a new partnership in the works we are confident will be able to deliver. Eventually. These things take time and with recent events in the Steemiverse, all is in flux.

So, rather than rest on our laurels, we decided to use Wordpress to create an idea of what our online literary journal will look like and bake in some of the functionality we want to appear in our final version. It would also serve to help cement our requirements with the dev team. As you may know, we at @thewritersblock have always been big fans on @steempress-io, a plugin that allows you to write posts on Wordpress and have them published to Steem. In fact, I am writing this post on my own personal blog at muxxy.co.uk. I have a little experience with Wordpress, but so far it has been a case of finding a theme I like and then customizing it through whatever options it has.

For our site, we couldn't find a pre-made theme that gave us everything we wanted. In typical Muxxy fashion, I threw myself into learning all I could about awesome new tools that allow you to customize everything about the way your Wordpress site looks. When I say new, it has been about five years since I last played with Wordpress, and the advances it has made during that time are mind-blowing. One such tool I discovered is Elementor, a brilliant and powerful visual editor.

We wanted to implement night mode into the site to make it easier on the eyes to read: although a plugin does exist to add this functionality, flipping it on did not change everything we wanted. Therefore I had to delve into CSS, an undiscovered country for me.