Thinking About the Blog Theme

Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to change my WordPress theme.

For six months, I’ve been using Anders Noren’s Hitchcock theme (with some modifications on my part). It’s a great theme and I like it, but it’s been six months, and I feel like refreshing things would be a nice touch since it’s spring.

Last week, Automattic released the Shoreditch theme. I took a look at the demo site, both on my PC and my smartphone. I liked the way it looked on both. I had the thought, “This would make a good foundation.”

And by “foundation” I mean, “Let’s modify the heck out of this.”

I ruminated on this a bit on Twitter last night:

The easy way to accomplish removing the sidebar — I think — would be to have sidebar.php in the child theme return, which would mean no sidebar, and then either the content div will fill the space automatically or I may have to write a CSS rule to have the content div fill the space. We’re talking about two lines of code here.

Then, there are some Jetpack issues. Shoreditch’s social menu depends on Jetpack to function, which seems like an unnecessary dependency to me. (Jetpack is a bundle of services and plugins that rely on the WordPress.com servers to function.) Hitchcock uses a much simpler custom menu and a glyph font; I’d simply port that code over and replace the Jetpack function, eliminating the dependency.

After that, I’d want to tinker with fonts. And link colors. And the way the tag cloud looks. And a dozen things I haven’t thought of yet.

I haven’t started working on this. I’m still at the “just thinking” stage. The idea is there, but not the spark.

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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *