The new issue of The Writer<\/i> came in the mail a few days ago. It’s been sitting, sadly neglected, on a pile of magazines atop the dresser ever since, and this morning I put it in my briefcase to read on the train.<\/p>\n
As I read through the magazine, a long-dormant idea resurfaced.<\/p>\n
I keep meaning to redesign my blog. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
I sketched out, about a year ago, what I wanted. I tried to implement in on top of the Tarski theme I was using, but the code never worked right. Part of the problem could have been the way Tarski works under the hood; it has so<\/i> many hooks and routines that replace and enhance the standard WordPress function calls that it’s occasionally difficult to do things that should be simple. Like when I tried to implement dropdown menus. That really<\/i> didn’t work.<\/p>\n
Then the idea went away to some extent. I didn’t forget about it, per se, but it wasn’t that important. Did I really<\/i> want to spend my time working on PHP and CSS code? And I some longtime Allynologists will tell you, I change my website theme as often as the eighth Doctor loses his memory or some people lose their socks, so it never makes a lot of sense for me to do a lot of work under the hood on the code; I’ll just move on to something else because it looks shiny and cool.<\/p>\n
And does it make a lot of sense to alter the method of presentation? A fair percentage of my regular readers get their content through feeds; changing the look of the front page, which is what I had in mind, isn’t going to affect my regular readers at all<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Yet, I pulled out my clipboard and notebook paper, and began making rough sketches.<\/p>\n
A little more than a year ago, as a proof of concept for a project at work that never came to fruition, I put together an interesting little WordPress theme, and there are some elements of that theme that I wanted in my new homepage. There’s no reason why that code can’t carry over; unlike the Tarski addition I tried to make, I know<\/i> this code works.<\/p>\n
Interesting fun fact. I called that theme Sherrinford, after Sherlock Holmes’ oldest brother, even though there was nothing especially Victorian about the theme. :holmes:<\/p>\n
What I’m looking at is a bit of a hybrid. It would have some magazine-like features and some blog-like features. To someone reading on an RSS feed, there won’t be any apparent difference. To someone landing on a page deep in the archives thanks to a Google search, there will be absolutely no<\/i> difference. But to someone coming in to the front page, there’s going to be some major<\/i> differences in the way content is presented.<\/p>\n
I may<\/i> stay with the theme I’m using and then build the front page on top of that, taking elements from the Sherrinford code. Or, I may<\/i> start from scratch with a different theme’s code base. I haven’t decided yet; I see possibilities in both directions, and I know the second theme option if that’s the route I go.<\/p>\n
This is not<\/i> a priority, and I don’t expect to do any coding this week. I’ll sketch out some more, and figure out exactly<\/i> what I want to do. Then when I’m ready, I’ll put some Barenaked Ladies in the stereo and start to code PHP; there’s just something<\/i> about BNL that just makes coding that<\/i> much better.<\/p>\n
It would be so much easier if I had any sense of design. But I don’t. \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The new issue of The Writer came in the mail a few days ago. It’s been sitting, sadly neglected, on a pile of magazines atop the dresser ever since, and this morning I put it in my briefcase to read on the train. As I read through the magazine, a long-dormant idea resurfaced. I keepContinue reading “On Design Decisions”<\/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":[351,4096,4102],"class_list":["post-2492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wordpress","tag-meta","tag-wordpress","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2492","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=2492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}