It’s Theme Change Day here at Greywulf Towers, for a number of entirely unrelated reasons. These are thus:
My previous theme was a memory hog
I utterly love Mystique as a theme, but it is rather podgy when it comes to memory use. All that fancy javascript to power the twitter feeds and funky sidebar counts for something, and on a memory leaky (but otherwise great) browser such as Firefox 5, leaving my own blog page open overnight is a recipe for having to kill Firefox in the morning. That ain’t good.
Not all of the blame can be laid on Mystique, of course. I was also using the oh-so-clever OnSwipe plugin which gave iPad using readers a magazine-style view of my site. Awesome yes, but it uses another Fifty freakin’ meg of memory on a regular browser while it’s active. Ouch. Buh-bye.
Change is good
Like most folks, I get bored easily, and blog boredom means fewer posts. Changing the theme breathes life into old dog, and that (hopefully) leads to more posts, right?
That’s the theory, anyhow.
Clutter
Blogs, by very definition, grow. Left to themselves, blogs tend to collect new Widgets, cool Plugins, links to internal posts and other sites, kewl flashing sidebar graphics and all the rest. A blog is like an untamed bush that can easily swamp out a corner of the garden.
When that happens, all you can do is prune back, hard.
Which leads us to……
Minimal is the new black
I’ve mentioned it before, but the latest version of WordPress 3.2 has a fantastic Full Screen editor mode. Hit F11 too, and you’ve got a completely blank screen to enter your words. As users of Writeroom and the many clones will testify, distraction free writing means you write more words, better. All of those words then get pushed into your blog theme which adds loads of doodads, widgets and links to side-track the reader.
If distraction free writing is good, why not distraction free reading? This theme is a bit of an experiment. Melville takes out all of the distractions and provides a beautiful layout for the words and pictures. It isn’t perfect – there’s no place for link love, for example – but I plan to fix that by activating widgets on the footer. Over all though, I like it.
Let me know what you think.
UPDATE: Another day, another theme change. Much as I like Melville, it’s just too stark. Hope you like the new one. Thanks for the feedback, all!
You know me, I’m all about the change. I like this minimalist approach… but I’d miss my widgets and links if this was my blog ;)
Yeah. As it stands this is probably a bit too stripped back, even for my tastes. I’ll be slowly adding some elements back over the next few days.
I like it. Very stripped right to the point. I follow the RSS so only go straight to the new article anyway. That said, some sort of graphic just for a touch of trade dress might be a nice touch.
Its OK, but it lacks a little something. (I never really cared for the little troll or whatever was randomly chosen for my posts here.)
Maybe you should use a render for background imagery or something?
Maybe a little more colour would help? (Please… not low power plasma friendly.)
@UHF I agree. Something is missing. I’ll keep working on it. If all else fails, there’ll be another Theme Change Day real soon :)
I suppose that would be better than nothing.. (that’s kind of a pun)
:-)