Welcome to the latest incarnation of Roaming Tales and The Gooseberry Fool. Things probably look a bit different to what you’re used to but I hope you like it.
After a lot of thought and listening to feedback from readers, I have decided to merge the two sites. There’s a lot of crossover between food and travel – especially when writing about restaurants and ethnic cuisine – and I felt that my passion for the topics was not best served by diluting it across two blogs. I felt that I was stretched too thinly maintaining both blogs on top of my (much neglected) personal blog and paid blogging for sites such as EcoSalon.
If you have been diverted here from www.thegooseberryfool.com, you can still focus on food posts by visiting the Gooseberry Fool category. The sub-categories include cookery & recipes, health & food issues, and restaurants & food travel.
The Roaming Tales category houses my travel blog posts with sub-categories for on the road (covering the practicalities of travel, such as transport and hotels), places and inspiration (probably the most active channel as this is what I enjoy the most), and travel trends & issues (where I talk about everything from travel blogging to environment and ethics).
I’m hoping to offer separate RSS feeds for the Roaming Tales and Gooseberry Fool categories so people can continue to follow their specific interests. Does anyone know if this is possible and how it’s done?
I also have a separate category for guest posts to highlight contributions by my fellow food and travel bloggers and another category for professional articles to showcase my published food and travel articles. (For a full exploration of my professional work, including writing on other topics such as media and general news, please visit my professional site at www.caitlinfitzsimmons.com).
I have upgraded to a new premium theme, which gives me much more functionality and flexibility. I’m particularly pleased with the featured posts function, which shows rotating images at the top of the home page. I have also tagged all of my content so you can also navigate by tags, found at the bottom of each post. This post will be tagged ‘blogging’ and ‘trends’, for example.
I still have more to do – I’m yet to implement ads for example, which is why there are some emtpy purple boxes on the site. And I’m hoping to introduce video very soon.
I owe you all a post on the Best Job in the World but for now, I should very quickly say thank you for your support but sadly I didn’t make it to the top 50. I’m still really pleased that I got involved and I’ll do a follow-up post very soon to throw my weight behind some of the finalists that I think deserve to make the top 11.
What do you think of the new site design? Any suggestions or advice?
Great idea to merge the blogs Caitlin, you seem to have everything very organized and easy to navigate and I like this layout too, well done!
Hey, Snap the theme! We must both have great taste.
Let me know if you have any tips about customising – mine are all here
http://www.heatheronhertravels.com/my-blogging-journey/
Hi Heather! You tipped me off to Revolution (now called Studiopress) but I didn’t realise I’d gone for the exact same theme within that. I hope you don’t mind me copying! I’ll certainly check out your tips and share mine. – Caitlin.
I think you absolutely made the right decision to merge the two blogs, Caitlin. Your new layout is so well-organized, people shouldn’t have any trouble finding whichever topic they’re looking for. I’m afraid I don’t know enough about RSS Feeds to give you any advice on that.