A Surprise Redesign: Welcome to the New Expat Edna!

I’m a small-stakes waffler. I’ll lay in bed for an hour in the mornings debating if I reeeally want a shower, or waste twenty minutes rewriting the same email with different comma placements. (These blog posts take days to finalize for not dissimilar reasons.)

But the larger and brasher the decision, the happier I am to plow ahead with the first impulse that comes to mind. Move to [insert new country] without a job or money? Hell yeah. Meet a Tinder date in the countryside at night with no cell service or ability to speak the local language, again? Well, I haven’t been murdered yet.

So a couple weeks ago when I peeked at my nine-year-old site and decided I was just tired of looking at its buggy homepage, non-mobile layout, and overall “I was raised in the early 2010s” energy, it took just one person to casually suggest, A new theme would probably most of your site problems? and I was like, SOLD.

Six days later: I have a new site.

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To technology’s credit, it was much easier (and cheaper!) than I anticipated; cost plus a fear of breaking things was largely why I’d been putting off maintenance for so long. I know so little about hosting or WordPress or the basics of how a blog works, and when I first moved to self-hosting in 2012 it all seemed so delicate and complicated, I assumed it would still be that way.

But it was almost annoyingly easy to make the change? I would’ve done this ages ago had I known. It took one day to convince myself to ditch my old theme — I really was committed to keeping the look, but in hindsight it was definitely dated — another day to pick & purchase a new theme, and on the third day it all came together. (The process only took six days because the guy I hired to make all the changes under the hood lives in Greece, and we were playing email tag across timezones.)

For anyone else pondering a glow-up: all in all theme + install cost me under $140, which is like a month of grocery monies, but I’ve pretty much been living like a monk since March so decided the spend would be worth it. And boy was it: I love how fresh my new homepage looks; it sparks joy to see load up every time. (Also, it’s finally https secure and mobile friendly! About time. I’m so sorry to anyone who has tried to read my blog on a phone until now.)

So, here we are. Expat Edna V3. I’m still kicking the tires a bit round back, reformatting old posts & photos and updating some pages & layouts — but feel free to have a poke around, and let me know if you see something I missed that’s making your eye twitch just a lil bit.

The past couple of months have been hard, as they have been for many, many people, and only recently have things finally started looking up again. I take it as a promising sign that this redesign took less than a week from inception to completion — hopefully it means I’m getting better at letting go of control, and being okay with the idea that things don’t have to be perfect to be good.

Even though I don’t know what the future holds or where I’ll end up (then again I rarely do, so at least this isn’t unfamiliar territory), gifting myself this little unplanned makeover as an early 31st birthday present and kickoff to the next step — it feels like a good start. Thank you to all of you who are still here, still reading after all these years.

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Shoutouts: I got my new theme from Solo Pine; it’s absurdly easy to work with so I don’t have to worry about breaking code anymore (whew!). For tech support I hired a guy from FixMySite (affiliate link), who responded to every email within hours and was clearly working on a weekend to get everything up and running. Would definitely recommend.  

*If you’re still seeing my old theme, make sure you’re using HTTPS. My old site still shows up on just http at the moment and I don’t know how to fix that yet. Baby steps.