Productive Scholar

The new theme is up and running. Since started Productive Scholar, getting a new theme was on top of my todo list. The old theme looked fine, the main problem was that it is one of the most popular theme for Wordpress blogs (the blog platform I’m using), which means it is used by thousands of other blogs.

The new theme is not a custom one because I’m not good at web design and custom themes are not that cheap. I decided to take a free web template called terrfirma 1.0 by NodeThirtyThree and make a Wordpress theme out of it (adapt it to work with my web platform). Furthermore, I modified it to fit my custom needs (two sidebars, slightly different style). Since this theme is not easily available for other blogs, Productive Scholar should have a fairly distinct look.

The photo on the top right is the view at the end of the Main Mall at the University of British Columbia. It was taken by flickr user sillygwailo.

I’m very pleased with the result and I hope you’ll like it too.

It seems like I have a hard time posting as often as I want. I dropped the idea of posting daily links to post on other blogs, I’ll just post some from time to time when I judge them to be relevant and when I have something to add or to comment on them. As for my original articles, I try to continue to post one or two a week.

Spring break UBC is in one week, so I’m pretty busy this week (one exam, lots of assignments due…). However, you can expect a post or two this week (because I’m almost done writing them). If I have time during spring break, I might spend some time updating the blog to a custom theme so it looks nicer.

If you’re in the same situation as me, good luck!

Photo: Fabiola Medeiros

Since I’ve had the idea for this blog, I’ve been thinking about my goal for the frequency of posting. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself, especially since schoolwork can be very time consuming (I bet you know it as well as I do!), but I think setting goals is very important when you want to achieve something.

I think that at least for the first few months, I should try to get at least one post per day. Most of those will be short articles; either of summary of interesting readings for the day or tidbits on interesting software for grad students. At least once a week, I’m going to write a longer article (such as the one on LaTeX yesterday) to cover some topic more in depth. I hope this frequency will be enough for you, readers, to come back often to check my blog.

Welcome to Productive Scholar!

It’s been a couple of years since my last blog (I stopped when I started grad school!) and I felt it was time to go back to my old habits. This time, my focus is going to be on personal productivity, life hacks, software tutorials and tips for grad students (and possibly undergrad students and faculty members).

My goals for doing the Productive Scholar are:

• to share tips and tricks I’ve picked up over the years
• to learn from my readers, so please share in the comments!
• to make a little money (at least to repay the hosting costs)

I hope you’ll find my articles useful and again, please use the comments to share with all.