Coding a New Blog Theme

In recent weeks I have been working on a WordPress theme.

There’s nothing wrong with what I have. I like the Argo theme that NPR created. It does a lot of really nice things. I wanted a magazine-style front page, and I enjoyed putting that together.

However, Argo isn’t not mobile-friendly. It wasn’t designed to be; it was made for a 960-pixel grid. I have made it mobile-friendly with a child theme I created that turns the grid into percentages, and that works fairly well except for my front page. The slider isn’t resizable, and to be honest I had a bear of a time when I coded it originally.

I started to wonder if I could build a new front page with a responsive slider. I quickly ran into difficulty; Argo loads a lot of JavaScript, I needed more for the slider, none of it plays nicely, and things broke.

This required some thinking. I decided to build what I wanted on top of another, responsive theme, taking the things from Argo that I liked along for the ride.

It’s not close, not yet. Soon, though.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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