About Me

My name is Liz and WordStamped is my blog about building a WordPress blog from scratch using Oxygen Builder.

I've worked with WordPress since 2008. At first I used free themes to build WordPress sites, but then I heard about the Thesis theme. I used Thesis for a few years until it seemed to lose its way. Then in 2012 I discovered the Genesis Framework and fell in love with it.

Genesis became my framework of choice for the following 7 years until 2019. We developed a number of useful Genesis-related WordPress plugins to make the job of site building easier. For example, Genesis Dambuster was one of ours. It is no longer maintained because there is no longer any need for it in WordPress' new incarnation.

After Gutenberg had been released by Automattic I realised that themes would eventually become irrelevant. Building sites based on themes is incompatible with Gutenberg and its ambitions to perform whole site editing. With all of this in mind, I looked around for a builder that would eliminate the need for a theme and suit someone (me) who disliked page builders.

Can you imagine how surprised I was to find Oxygen just sitting there all theme-free and developer-friendly? How weird was that, so I bought it immediately.

France

I'm of mixed heritage, (English/Jamaican), British, and was up until 2019, living in the UK. But I've always wanted to live in France so when Brexit came along and changed the UK overnight into a place I did not recognise, it quickly brought my plans to relocate forward.

Now that I'm here, I wake up every morning and cannot believe my luck. The view from our house is stunning. But to be fair, the whole area is exceptionally beautiful. This for example is how roads and houses tend to look.

And this is the view from my balcony.

France is a cool country on the whole, apart from a couple of issues - one being their obsession with admin. Bureaucracy here makes Vogons look good ...

The only thing I miss about the UK is food shopping at Waitrose. Supermarkets in my area of the Haute-Savoie don't have the same variety that I was used to in the UK. But for the climate and the planet, that is possibly a good thing.

I am working to improve my French and am studying for the DELF B2 exam.

Veganism

I was an on/off vegetarian for years. But in 2010, we made moves to increase the vegan content of our diets until we became practically fully vegan. I pretty much believe that if we were all vegan

• it'd be generally easier for everyone to be vegan
• we'd all spend less on food and also potentially on healthcare
• rates of heart disease and cancer and other food related diseases would be significantly reduced
• zoonotic diseases which are killing people would be much less likely to spread to the human population
• greenhouse gases would be reduced by eliminating the need to breed millions of animals
• seas could be spared pollution caused by fishing (it's responsible for 85% of the plastic pollution in the sea)
• forests could remain intact
• we'd be better people, more compassionate
• we'd improve the planet and the culture for those that are yet to be born
• and most importantly - animals would not pointlessly suffer and die to feed our obsession with flesh

What's not to like?