I’m taking the excuse of WordPress 3.6 to change up my theme yet again. This time, I’m electing to go with the somewhat minimalist but very readable Ryu, from Takashi Irie (who I am happy to call colleague).
I’ll need to find my own twist on it at some point, but for now the default is looking lovely. I miss my Galaga homage already but think I can come up with something even better.
At some point other than today I should find reasons to fill it with words as well.
Tonight’s been a game of flipping from one theme to another for me. I have been using Carrington for a while here, but I grew bored with the base look of the thing and wanted something a little more unique.
I worked with one for a while—even edited some old posts in order to fit the theme—but discovered a few problems in the admin side of the theme and unfortunately had to abandon it.
What I landed on is something that interests me greatly. It’s originally designed for a photoblog. The big thing you will notice is that it doesn’t have a traditional front page like most blogs do; it instead has a series of images. Each post on the blog will now have an image uploaded that works with the theme of the post. I’m going to use a combination of images from my own photography (something I intend to continue working on) and Creative Commons-licensed works from flickr like the one that accompanies this post.
I will of course give credit where credit is due for any and all CC-licensed images.
In addition, I’ve taken some steps to simplify here. You’ll notice that the new theme doesn’t support a standard sidebar. I’m OK with this, as I normally find that sidebars tend to get overly cluttered and stick out like sore thumbs. The main page wouldn’t work with them anyway, and if you’re interested in my Delicious links or in my Twitter posts, I’m sure you’ll just find your way over to those services anyway.
I’m also taking a large chunk of posts beyond a certain date, permanently archiving them, and removing them from the site. The past is great, and I will always have a record of those posts and stories, but right now I want to focus more on the present and on what I have going on. Everyone’s entitled to a reset once in a while.
(Photo credit: “Musical Chairs” by flickr user David Maddison.)
The acute of vision will notice that I just switched over the blog to a brand new theme that I’ve been developing in my spare time over the past couple of weeks. I was going to wait a touch longer to get a few more things in there, but I’ve grown to like it so much that I wanted to port it over, even if it’s not really done yet.
There are a few more things in my TODO list for the redesign, including fine-tuning the look of individual posts and pages, which right now are very hit-or-miss, and I have a couple more post styles that I haven’t added yet. I got around to styling my links posts this time (finally), so they wont’ look as ugly as they had before.
If you notice something out of sorts, let me know. It will be a couple of days before I have the opportunity to go back over the stuff I’ve missed, but I’ve had a lot of fun working with this redesign to integrate the tumble-like style I’d been working with into a new aesthetic. It’s very monochromatic, and any use of color is there to draw your attention intentionally. There’s only one image in the theme of any kind, and it’s my first attempt in a very long time at a pure-CSS layout.
Yes, only a few short hours ago, I officially turned twenty-eight years of age. Thanks to all the people who left messages and/or e-mails for me or threw something up on my Facebook wall, or similar actions.
A whole lot has happened in recent memory, and it’s only now that things seem to be calming down to the point where I can take my time and make decisions without needing to worry that a situation is going to change drastically or circumstances will be altered enough for me to worry about it.
You’ll notice that with my birthday, I’ve altered the theme used here for a while. There’s no banner at the moment (I haven’t installed anything I can use to work with images yet on my new computer), but I hope to have that up and working sometime tomorrow. This will be my new launching point for a redesigned look and an attempt at something different. I have a “plan b” in place as well, so don’t be surprised if the final effort looks very dissimilar. Most of what will happen is a question of how far I can successfully stretch my CSS editing skills.
This post isn’t really for catching up or anything of the sort – more like checking in. The combination of the new year and my birthday lend themselves quite nicely to trying out new habits, one of which is more frequent posting here (more than just funneled tweets from Twitter).
I’m also working on a nifty little project for those of you who are Lutheran Service Book users, one which I think you’ll enjoy and (hopefully) use to the fullest. I’ll have more to post on that sometime this week.
