New Theme; New Start
September 4, 2007
Over the last few months, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to summon up the motivation to write any blog posts. It wasn’t as though there was nothing to write about; I just felt that I had nothing of value to add to the conversation that wasn’t being said elsewhere. I think it comes down to the fact that this blog was too narrowly focused on games, gadgets and technology, and the only way to give my blogging the kick up the arse it needs is to broaden the horizon.
So, first things first - out with the old and in with the new. It was a tough decision to ditch the Cordobo theme, which I’ve used since moving this blog over to Wordpress, but I needed to do something positive to get myself back in the driving seat. I spent what felt like an age looking something fresh, light and clean and, after filtering out the search results for “ladies unmentionables”, I came across this theme by Adam Walker Cleaveland, which immediately pressed all the right buttons for me.
For the header image, I’ve used a picture that I took at the harbour in Nantucket while waiting for the ferry back to Hyannis, which I then cropped and flipped. I’m not sure about the font for the header text, though; it feels a little too clunky. Perhaps I need to add it directly to the image and use something with less weight? For the favicon, I cropped the header image still further, and used HTMLKit’s favicon service.
To display my Twitters in the sidebar, I’ve used Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin; I also use another of Alex’s plugins - Share This - which provides an elegant and unobtrusive way for readers to add a post to a number of social networking/bookmarking sites.
I’m far from finished though; there are still some further tweaks that I will make over the coming days:
I need to revise and consolidate my categories.
When I started this blog, I didn’t take the time to understand the difference between categories, keywords and tags (oh, my!); consequently I have a bunch of random/orphaned categories that need tidying up. I figure I can use a SQL query to rename them, but I wonder how that affects incoming links and indexes?
The categories list is dull.
The alphabetical list of categories isn’t as engaging as the tag-cloud I used to have; that needs to be put right.
I need to fix the sidebar and footer presentation on the static pages.
If you take a look at my Link Blog or Contact Me pages, you’ll see that the side bars and footer aren’t being rendered.
I want to change the sidebar widgets that present the RSS Feeds.
The default on the widgets doesn’t include the RSS icon; a small thing, I know, but it’s a daft omission.
I need to change the Search function.
I felt that the Search box provided by the theme interfered too much with the header image; on the other hand, the Wordpress-provided Search widget is too “blah”. I need something that fits better with the crispness of the theme.
The presentation of the Technorati tags needs changing.
Like the Search box, the way these are presented now looks like an afterthought.
I’ve listed these things here because I remember reading a blog post some weeks back about publishing stuff that you want to get done; once it’s out there, it’s harder to procrastinate and put them off. (If anyone can help me out with that link, I’ll update this post.)
So, here’s the new look at andrewterry.com - this will be the catalyst for me writing about things other than tech stuff; stuff I want to get off my chest; stuff that I can share; stuff that I hope more people can engage with.
How do you like it?
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