redesign

I’ve switched themes on my blog. Again. And, once more, I just yanked an off-the-shelf theme and slightly tweaked the CSS to make it do what I want.

Before (left), using the excellent Journalist theme, and after (right) using the Magazine Basic theme:

journalistmagazine-basic

They’re both good, so why switch? I was messing around with Magazine Basic for a blog at the Teaching & Learning Centre, where we needed a more magazine or newspaper feel to it. And was struck by how much I liked the theme. I like that it’s very clean, but polished. It only shows excerpts for the last few articles on the front page, and will show small versions of images if they’re available for a post. I like that it’s not purely river-of-posts – there’s no “Older Posts” link on the front page. Once things trickle off the front, they’re accessed via the category and tag pages. No humans use the “Older Posts” stuff, and googlebot has a full index of the site, so that design was redundant clutter anyway. I like that full posts aren’t on the front page – that means more posts are visible at a glance, and most people won’t even notice because they’re coming from Google (directly to a post anyway) or RSS.

I’ll give it a try for awhile. But so far, I’m really liking it.

11 thoughts on “redesign”

  1. Dude,

    You;re changing your theme too much. Stop, I like Journal a lot. It was classic and elegant, this is like the D'”Arcy Norman magazine. Kill it, I demand the old theme back. Hell, I demand you return to K2 and stop dicking around with your theme.

  2. I was tinkering with a magazine theme as well, but wasn’t able to find one that worked for me, but one of my students is building an eportfolio theme where the “memory” of a traditional blog gets in the was – this seems to work well for your content though.

    1. thanks. hadn’t noticed that. bizarre! the theme hardcodes a full copyright rights reserved statement into the footer. I’ve yanked it.

  4. I like the look. But, though I barely qualify as human, I frequently use the “older posts” link… both when I discover a new blogger, or when catching up with a favorite blogger that I haven’t read in some time.

    No reason for you not to do whatever the hell you want, of course…

  5. Let Groom be mad and do your thing! I switch themes quite a bit as well if only to help keep my mind moving around a bit. The thing that matters to me in the end is that you are writing and sharing pictures. I see you through my reader, but more and more click into the original post to make sure I have an up to date version and to see all the comments. Enjoy the switching!

  6. I too, use the older posts link when I’m first finding a new site-
    Sometimes a chronology works. It’s also great to find something I just read three weeks ago- or so.
    The guys here are in love with the paid theme Thesis http://diythemes.com/thesis/ these days- very flexible with lots of hooks.

  7. I have to say that I like the theme. In fact, I may change to it myself. I have been looking for something that works well and avoids the “river of posts” frontpage also.

    However, I must agree with Brian and David, I use the “older links” and “older posts” links quite a bit when reading some blogs. I do this most on the ones that I don’t read every day, since I just don’t have the time to read them all and I still have problems with the whole RSS aggregation method of keeping track of updates.

    Most RSS readers work great, but I would love to have an RSS reader that keeps track of the things that I read beyond the intro text and then highlights similar entries so that I can focus, or at least attempt to, on the items that are of great attraction.

    Andy

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