I’ve recently made a few minor changes to this blog.  So minor, in fact, that you may not have noticed them.  Allow me to bring them to your attention.

For two or three years, the top menu of Asian Meanderings featured links to a number of static pages.  The problem with these was that I hadn’t updated any of them since 2011!  Several served as public records of the books I’ve read; I’d rather just maintain my shelves on Goodreads now.

So, I have replaced those static pages with pages for each of the more popular categories on this blog.  This makes it simple(r) to find all of my articles in each of these topics.  As you can see, these are “About Phuket”, “Thailand”, “Travels” (with sub-categories for Laos, Malaysia and Cambodia), “Books & Reading”, and “Philately” (stamp collecting and Postcrossing).  I think I will move “Thailand” under “Travels” so I can fit the “Teaching category into the menu (despite having written little on this subject in recent months).

I wanted to preserve the “About Me” page so that brought about the first sidebar tweak — a widget which will deliver a person clicking it to my page on About.me.  (By the way, the only other page I’ve kept is the rather lengthy “A History of Phuket”, although I’d rather readers check out Colin Mackay’s uniformly excellent book instead).

Other sidebar tweaks include a Goodreads widget of my recently finished books, a hits counter (6700+ different visitors in the two years since I moved the blog to WordPress.com) and a drop-down box listing all the categories on the blog.  I think any other additions would clutter it up too much.  However, I may add a blogroll if I can ever find the time to organize one…

With the minor tweaks, I am also toying with the idea of a change in themes (which looks to be a major redesign but is really easy to do).  Personally, I like the current look — I find it easier to read white lettering on a black background and most of my current apps are in a similar dark/night theme.  And did you know that the pattern on the borders comes from a real piece of Phuket-style Thai silk?

At any rate, I do get bored looking at the same thing all the time so I have been perusing a bit in the WordPress theme gallery.  I’ve found a couple that I like more than a bit.  The first is called Pachyderm and those who don’t like darkness will find it refreshing:

I also thought the Chalkboard theme was cute, but I would feel a need to write more about teaching if I were to use it:

Let me know in the Comments which design you like the best.  Or, tell me if I should just leave well enough alone.  You won’t hurt my feelings.  Honest.

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