{"id":2147,"date":"2009-01-04T15:54:31","date_gmt":"2009-01-04T20:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=2147"},"modified":"2009-01-04T15:54:31","modified_gmt":"2009-01-04T20:54:31","slug":"on-changing-the-decorations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=2147","title":{"rendered":"On Changing the Decorations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Christmas has passed (unless you&#8217;re Orthodox, and then you have a few days left), and I felt the <i>itch<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>The itch to change my blog theme, that is.<\/p>\n<p>I had a wintry theme going for the holidays.  The holidays are past.  &#8220;Change, m&#8217;dear, and not a moment too soon!&#8221; and all that. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>And since this is going to get needlessly technical and geeky&#8230; <lj-cut><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I knew I wanted to make some changes to my layout in the New Year.  But what?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve become enchanted of magazine-style themes.  Partly it&#8217;s because of some things I&#8217;ve been thinking about for work, where a magazine-format would make more sense than the traditional blog architecture; a magazine puts important content first and highlights it, and then allows the reader to delve deeper as need be.  (I flirted with this with my long experiment with <a href=\"http:\/\/warpspire.com\/hemingway\/\">Hemingway<\/a> last winter, but I had one <i>major<\/i> problem &mdash; Hemingway <i>killed<\/i> my readership, because it was <i>too<\/i> restrictive on the amount of content available <i>first<\/i>.)<\/p>\n<p>I looked at <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelhutagalung.com\/2008\/08\/arthemia-20-released-the-updates\/\">Arthemia<\/a>, which I actually like a lot, and even played around with for a day while I thought about the changes I would need to make to it to fit my needs &mdash; and the changes it would make to the way <i>I<\/i> write.  Another I looked at was <a href=\"http:\/\/themehybrid.com\/themes\/visionary\">Visionary<\/a>, but I&#8217;m not really sure it was <i>me<\/i>.  Finally, I was intrigued by some of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.revolutiontwo.com\/\">RevolutionTwo themes<\/a>, in particular Structure and Church.  However, while I had downloaded both while they were free, after <a href=\"http:\/\/www.briangardner.com\/blog\/kicking-off-2009-a-bit-early.htm\">the change in licensing them to paid themes<\/a> I decided that using them and modifying them to my needs would have been awkward, and given my penchant to change my blog theme the way others change socks wouldn&#8217;t have made a purchase of a license worthwhile in the long-term.<\/p>\n<p>So, what did I do?<\/p>\n<p>I downloaded an old version of Tarski (specifically, <a href=\"http:\/\/tarskitheme.com\/2008\/08\/10\/23-release\/\">version 2.3<\/a>) because 1) I was familiar with it, having used it as my theme base for a long while, and 2) because I <i>really<\/i> liked the way Tarski, at least in the old versions, formatted comments.  The newest version takes advantage of WordPress 2.7&#8217;s threaded comments feature, only the comments don&#8217;t look as organic as they do in earlier versions.<\/p>\n<p>I probably could have used the most recent version of Tarski I had on my computer &ndash; <a href='http:\/\/tarskitheme.com\/2007\/12\/09\/205-release\/'>version 2.0.5<\/a>, except I wanted something more recent.  (Also, even though I <i>had<\/i> that version on my computer, I hadn&#8217;t <i>used<\/i> it; I&#8217;d ditched Tarski for first <a href=\"http:\/\/warpspire.com\/hemingway\/\">Hemingway<\/a> and then a succession of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.briangardner.com\/\">Brian Gardner<\/a>&#8216;s free designs long by that point.)<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t made any changes to it.  Yet.  Except to upload a custom header graphic.  I haven&#8217;t looked at the old custom stylesheets I&#8217;d created a few years ago.  Nor have I looked at the print.css stylesheet Tarski uses.  I&#8217;ll look at both in the coming days (and weeks) while I figure out what I want to do.<\/p>\n<p>Who knows?  Maybe I&#8217;ll pull out the old <i>Doctor Who<\/i> design and play around with that.  Or maybe I&#8217;ll decide to leave it pretty much as is.  Who can say?<\/p>\n<p>I did take some code I&#8217;d put into my functions.php file for a while to give me some custom sidebar widgets and turned that into a full-bore plug-in.  But that&#8217;s simply good thinking for the future. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><\/lj-cut>I figure this is a temporary waystation on the road to&#8230; wherever.  I&#8217;ll let you know when I get there. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christmas has passed (unless you&#8217;re Orthodox, and then you have a few days left), and I felt the itch. The itch to change my blog theme, that is. I had a wintry theme going for the holidays. The holidays are past. &#8220;Change, m&#8217;dear, and not a moment too soon!&#8221; and all that. \ud83d\ude42 And since<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=2147\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;On Changing the Decorations&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4095],"tags":[351,652,653,4096],"class_list":["post-2147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wordpress","tag-meta","tag-tarski","tag-website","tag-wordpress","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}