What’s new
- The site has been rebranded to Urbanist Wanderer, a new name that better reflects the direction of the site.
- A new visual layout for 2023 and beyond.
- More quality travel content.
What’s staying the same
- The links – Especially important if you’ve bookmarked posts on this site. A redirect will be setup to link Quirky Transit & Travel links to the correct page on Urbanist Wanderer.
- The info pages on Ireland and Newgrange – They’re being continuously updated to reflect new developments.
- Your subscription to the site – If you’ve subscribed to Quirky Transit & Travels via WordPress, your subscription will be carried over thanks to a nifty feature on Jetpack. Fingers crossed that this works fine.
- Same great content.
About Quirky Transit & Travels
Here’s a post I never thought I’d be writing when I first started the blog some 7 years ago.
I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I’d experimented with smaller blogs in my younger days. These were half-baked efforts done up on the Blogspot platform (imaginary brownie points to anyone who remembers!), which has now been renamed to “Blogger”. I never really maintained these mini blogs seriously, largely because I simply ran out of writing topics. Turns out, there really isn’t much to write about when you’re a school student, and I didn’t particularly fancy treating an online blog as a personal diary.
Fast forward to 2016, and I was a young university student who had just started his first year as an international student in Belfast, Northern Ireland. As is expected of any first sojourn abroad, it wasn’t long before I started exploring various parts of the island of Ireland, Great Britain and, of course, continental Europe. Truly, and I suspect many would relate, we often find that we do the most exploring in our student days – right before we enter the job market and switch to a daily 9 to 5 routine.
It was around that time that my interest in urban and transit planning coalesced into something more concrete, and this interest blurred over into an enthusiasm for train journeys alongside my longtime interest in aviation. Travelling across Ireland, GB, and Europe on trains and flying with new airlines gave me the idea that this was something I could probably write about. Taking advice from a fellow transport enthusiast, I plonked down in front of my laptop and created Quirky Transit & Travels on WordPress.com.
The site has since evolved from its early geeky focus entirely on train rides, into a a site focused more broadly on travelling. There’s still a focus on train journeys, but today the site also hosts flight reviews, write-ups on urban topics, as well as posts focusing on the travel destination itself. As far as possible, the site also hosts volunteer curated travel information on public transit. The focus is currently on Ireland, but I’m working on expanding the scope to include places beyond.
The Quirky Transit & Travels of today would be unrecognisable to me from 6 years ago, and given its new focus I figured it was time to rebrand and revamp the site. In preparation, all of the content on the site was reviewed and edited to more stringent quality standards and to reflect a more professional tone. Pictures from older posts were re-edited, and existing ones were augmented with shots from the same trip dug out from my photography folders – as it turns out, I had loads of usable photos that I never bothered taking the time to edit. I’ve also come to realise that some of the older posts have enough content to be severable into 2 separate posts, and that is something I’ll be slowly working on over the next few months.
The site has also been redesigned to reflect the new outlook with a cleaner, modern visual layout that emphasises the content and the accompanying images. Design is not a static process, however, and from time to time I’ll update the site’s visual layout for improvement’s sake where necessary. If you’ve taken a look at Quirky Transit & Travels recently, you may have noticed references to Urbanist Wanderer here and there – That’s because this is an adaptation of Urbanist Wanderer’s look for Quirky Transit & Travels.
Unfortunately, not everything old has met the new quality standards – a good number of photos taken then were from a time when my photography skills hadn’t quite developed, and some of the earliest posts featured photos taken on my then iPhone 5 which had a problem with dust in the lens. As you’d expect, this isn’t something that can be fixed even with the best editing software. Regretfully, this means that unless I can salvage the photos to a satisfactory-enough standard, some of my earliest posts may not make a reappearance on the site.
The site has lasted for 6 years, and I hope to see it last for many more. If you’ve been a silent follower of the site, I thank you for your readership and support; If you’re a passerby who stumbled upon this blog, thank you for your readership and do consider subscribing for our future content.
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