The winter break is over. Unlike other years, this time I decided to stay in Doha during the break to save a little money and work on some personal projects. A lot of these revolved around my goals for 2018. I cooked 12 different dishes from 8 of my cookbooks, that means I have 62 left. I also started doing rehab for my leg. The progress is slow and it’s a real test of patience because while I want to be more active, I also want to be pain-free. So I’m taking it slow and my fingers are crossed that my leg will be ok.

The other project I worked on was this blog. For the last eight years, the blog has been an incomplete project. It only had one link, and the posts were all unorganized. I didn’t plan to work on the blog layout, it just happened.  One day I had a look at the live previews of some different themes and I stumbled across one I really liked. I installed the theme but there were a couple of things I had to customize.

From there, my tenacity took over.  I organized my blog posts into a few different categories and set up pages so that allowed each category to be viewed independently. The main menu at the top displays the different categories for the blog posts. I also updated all the recipes and made the formatting for the recipe entries much cleaner.  On the side-bar, there’s a search box, a box listing recent posts, and another one that lists popular posts. Here’s a comparison of the old blog and new blog as seen on a desktop.

Old Version

New Version

The newer version is quite a bit nicer than the older one. When looking at it on mobile devices the difference is more dramatic.

Old Version	New Version

Now the site design is responsive so it adapts to the screen size for viewing on mobile devices as well! It’s a huge leap forward from the old blog layout I was using. It may have taken a long time, but overall, I’m very pleased with the results and the new look of the blog.