Tag Archives: theme

German Day at Exotics@RTC

The improvement in the pandemic in our region has meant that certain gatherings that were cancelled last year have been able to restart.  That includes the Exotics@RTC car gatherings in Redmond.  The first of the year that I was able to attend had a German theme to it.  The theme days do not exclude other car types but they provide a focus to the theme cars and give them pride of place within the center.  The other cars are out in the parking lot.

It won’t surprise you to learn that there were plenty of Porsche and Audi vehicles on display.  Mercedes was also represented but not in such large numbers.  There were some nice old Porsches to be seen including a pair on display which are owned by a father son team – the son being a neighbor of ours.  I was really pleased to see a nice selection of older BMWs and a Z1 which I recall from my teen years.  I had assumed the Audis would be more around the R8s (and there were a few of them) but to see a Quattro from the rallying era was a cool addition.

I had ridden down to Redmond on my bike so I wasn’t carrying heavy gear with me.  I went with the M6 which shows how useful it is for such a situation.  It is nice and compact plus, it has the folding screen which is great for getting low or high angle shots.  Waiting for people to move out of shot is always problematic in this events but they have as much right to be there as I do so I either wait a long time or just accept that the shot will be more cluttered than ideal.

I hope to get down there a lot more this season and see what they have to offer and what fun cars show up.  I will also share a few of the non-German cars from this day in another post to come.

Changing the Blog Template

If you are a regular reader of the blog, firstly, thank you.  Second, you will have noticed that the style has changed a bit.  I have been using the same WordPress theme since starting the blog.  I wasn’t desperate for a change but I was motivated to do something by a Facebook issue.  It used to be that I could put the link to a blog post in to Facebook and it would include the link and an image from the post – usually the first one.  The first image is usually my favorite for illustrating the topic so it gets the prime slot on the post.  However, something happened in the Facebook algorithms.  I would put in the link, the page would auto populate beneath the text with the right image and then I would hit post and it defaulted to the banner image from the theme rather than my actual image.

As a result of this, I had taken to deleting the link after it auto populated and then pasted in the main image manually.  This was a pin and it also seemed to reduce the number of people actually clicking on the post rather than just looking at the picture on Facebook.  I decided to try going to a more recent theme design to see if this fixed the issue.  I looked at a variety of them.  Some seemed okay but others were more business focused.  I selected a slightly newer theme but it still had a simple look to it which I liked.  I tested the change over and configured it as I wanted before switching.  I like the look and it now behaves better with Facebook so the whole exercise seems to have been worthwhile.