David Carrington

My Firefox has just told me to update my copy of 2.0.0.3 to 2.0.0.2… how helpful of it.

I’ve got something pretty major holding me back from developing my own stylesheet: I’m not familiar with the WordPress templates.

When I create a website, I’ve usually written 80% of the HTML and then applied a stylesheet. The other 20% of the HTML is all the widget parts that come later. With WordPress, I’m approaching the templates from scratch and there’s already a big mess of HTML in place, all with someone else’s IDs and class names.

So I’ll take a few steps back and delay things a bit more (procrastinating much?). The next step is to go all the way from scratch to figure out the template system as a whole - not just fudge someone else’s stylesheet to claim a theme to be my own.

Moral of the story: don’t write CSS without your socks on.

I wanted minimal, I wanted focus and I wanted well…. ok I’ve cheated for now and grabbed hold of the closest theme I could remember which roughly matched the requirements I was after.

However, there’s still not enough focus on the posts themselves, and I’d prefer the front page to work a bit better for my own personal writing style - I don’t like huge great whopping paragraphs of text. I like bullets, I like numbered lists and I like quotes.

“It’s ok to do less, skip details, and take shortcuts in your process if it’ll lead to running software faster” - another Getting Real quote.

See they agree with me! I’m allowed to cheat… erm… ok maybe that’s not exactly what they said but I’ll go with it for now.

A few things stand out from the rest that I need to change (in no particular order):

• The theme describes “David Carrington” like a product, not a person
• Block quotes show up too faint to read
• When viewing a single post, there’s too much emphasis on the left-hand-side meta information. I’ll move that to the right and/or style it to be less intrusive.
• I’ll get rid of trackback and comment feed links - I don’t like them.
• I’d prefer pipes in the page title rather than arrow symbols. “Blog Archive” is also redundant.
• Search box overlays the title link, making it hard to click (in FF at least)
• I’d like less emphasis on categories
• I want it to feel unique - so I’ll have to make some fundamental colour or layout changes.

“If you’re designing a page that displays a blog post, the blog post itself is the epicenter”
- Getting Real: Epicenter Design (by 37signals)

I like this concept, so I’ve moved back to WordPress and intend to create a minimal template which does exactly as above.

So here’s what I consider important on this page:

1. The post
2. A brief description of what this site is / who I am
3. Comments
4. Title /header
5. A list of previous posts

If it’s not on the list, it’s not going to be shown on the site.

Tonight’s experience with Blogger went like this:

1. I finished reading “Getting Real” - by 37 Signals
2. I got inspired to do some work on my blog
3. I tried playing around with Google / Blogger templates
4. I didn’t like it
5. I changed my nameservers back to my own host
6. I uploaded the latest stable release of WordPress
7. I manually copied the pitiful number of posts from my Blogger account

And that’s it. Blogger attempt is over as I’m much happier to use an open source and - more importantly - PHP blog engine. Which makes this about the 2nd or third time I’ve moved to WordPress.