You may be wondering why the MEADOR.ORG website took on a leatherbound look in late March of 2011 (as in a leather binder, silly, not sadomasochism). I’m reminded of how Ricardo Montalban used to market the “Corinthian leather” of the Chrysler Cordoba in his wonderfully sensual accent.

Sadly, Corinthian leather is about as genuine as the leather on my website. Anyway, here’s the story on why MEADOR.ORG has changed its look yet again:

Recently I was putting up a private site for family members to track me on my travels and liked the dark rich look of a travel theme on a service I was using. That prompted me to consider shifting all of my day hiking posts to a new blog with a similar look. I envisioned The Happy Wanderer blog about my travels, inspired by a performance of the carefree song sent to me by Dianne Martinez, an administrator in my district who likes to travel via motorcycle with her husband and reads about my much slower pedestrian perambulations online.

So I purchased happywanderer.us as a potential new site and began mucking about with various free services. The fancier services cost money and I spend enough on fuel and lodging already that I wish to avoid web hosting fees. The free ones with the features I desire still boil down to Blogger and WordPress. Blogger has improved only slightly since I left it several years ago, and its customer service, like all Google customer service, is poor. I used a silly outdated workaround to convert my WordPress day hiking posts and pages into Blogger imports, but was not satisfied with the site’s capabilities.

So I began looking at setting up another WordPress site (I use the more limited but free WordPress.com for this blog, rather than pay to host a fully customizable WordPress blog elsewhere). I really liked the Choco theme and was going to use it for my Happy Wanderer site.

But why segregate my posts into separate sites? I already tag each post so visitors can use the category cloud in the lower right-hand column at MEADOR.ORG to separate out the day hike posts from the technology posts, etc. So I decided to redirect happywanderer.us to simply show the day hiking posts here and switch over my blog to the attractive Choco theme.

Last May I changed the look of MEADOR.ORG and this latest change continues to simplify its look, which was fairly complex when I first switched to hosted blogging services after over a decade of hand-coding. I hope you like the new look as much as I do. Don’t worry, all of the content since 2006 is still here. And if you are only interested in day hikes, you can always use happywanderer.us to quickly sort that out of the jumble.