I’ve been playing around with wordpress for the past couple of days (yes, instead of doing the schoolwork that I’m desperately behind on). There are several changes that I want to announce, even though I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned most of them already over the past couple of posts.

1. Countdown. I’ve added the countdown widget (left) and bargraph to keep track of how many days left until we leave for Urumqi. (!!!) As the bar gets less blue and more orange, we get closer and closer to leaving.
2. Flickr. The previous post talks about how I’ve set up a flickr.com account for sharing photos during the WorldTour(TM). I think I’ve sent invitations out to everyone already, but if I’ve missed you, let me know and I’ll add you to my “family” list so you can see all my travel photography from abroad.
3. Viewpoints. Related to the Flickr account, this new little widget (also left) will randomly display two of my favorite photos from the gallery. You can click on them to access my Flickr gallery webpage.
4. Subscribe2. This new plugin (currently located at the bottom of the left menu, if you scroll down) makes it possible for you to sign up for email updates everytime I post something new to this site. Yes, now you’ll never have to inadvertantly miss an exciting WorldTour(TM) Journal (which will from now on be referred to as WTJ) post ever again. Just subscribe with your email address and you’ll get a confirmation email ASAP. Once you’ve confirmed, you’ll start receiving posts directly in your inbox.

And also, this last thing probably won’t be too visible to you guys, but the WTJ has been officially updated to wordpress version 3.21! Yayness!

That is all.

A new travel-related quote will now be generated in the header each time this page is loaded. So go ahead, click on the refresh button and give it a go. And if you have any nice travel quotes that you want to share, leave a comment on this post.

The new domain (www.WorldTourTM.com) has been registered and the weblog has been set up, so I’m feeling good. I decided to go with WordPress because it comes highly recommended, and also because it’s the easiest to load on this server with DreamHost’s handy one-click installation. (That’s my small shoutout to DreamHost, which I heartily encourage you to check out if you’re thinking of changing/buying webspace.)

There’s a million other things yet to do, but it still feels nice to have one thing done and finished. I’m going to work on getting the photo album all set up next. I want all this technical stuff to be done before the end of summer, because I know I’m not going to have time to work on it during the semester.

And everything, of course, must be set up before we embark on the WorldTour(TM). More on that later.