I finally took the plunge and made some of the updates to my blog that I’ve been putting off.  If you’ve been keeping up with my posts, you should immediately notice that I changed the theme.  Although I loved my previous theme’s color scheme and I’m a huge sucker for walling things off in boxes with rounded edges (it is my preferred design for conference posters!), it just wasn’t functional enough.  The theme didn’t allow for anything but parent pages to appear at the top of the website, which meant a lot of extra work if I wanted to include subpages.  This irritated me more than I can possibly say and I’ve wanted to change the theme for a while.  It was only a matter of time before a theme came along that had the functionality I craved without sacrificing too much in the way of the design.  This is the result!  I hope it will work well, though there’s a good chance I will change it again if a theme that better fits my design preferences comes along.

The other thing I’ve updated is the gallery page.  There’s actually a gallery there now!  The gallery will contain all of the images you see on my blog that I have taken myself, i.e. those that I have the right to distribute as I wish.  The gallery is in part a tool for myself (so I can easily see which photos I’ve used – slogging through my media gallery is an incredibly slow and painful experience), but I think it will be handy for people who wish to look at photos of a whole group of insects or easily find a photo without having to remember the name or the date of the post on which it was featured.  The main gallery page (the one you’ll arrive at if you click Gallery above) is arranged by taxonomic order in order of ascending evolution according to Grimaldi and Engel.  The galleries for individual orders are arranged alphabetically by family.  For those of you who have no idea what this means, not to worry!  I have also included the common names of the orders and families for your convenience.  I’ll be adding images to the gallery as I create posts, so it will serve as a repository for all of the photos that I’ve made available on my blog.  I think it will be a useful tool and will improve the educational value of my blog.

I continue to be very busy with research projects and these changes took quite a bit of time to make, but I hope to have a new post up in the next few days.  Thank you all for your continued readership and support!

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