Brick

It’s time for a change. Way past time for the blog Brick.

As of today, because I couldn’t stand wait­ing for July 1, the begin­ning of a quar­ter, or June 1, the next detail-fixated date, I have changed the theme of this blog.

Brick 2004-12, Word­Press’ very­plain­text theme

Theme is what wordpress.org calls a tem­plate. The theme orga­nizes the over­all look, the type fonts, the nav­i­ga­tion (those indexes etc.). Thou­sands of them are freely avail­able, because wordpress.org and the sis­ter wordpress.com are glo­ri­ously open source. These are cre­ated by novice web design­ers learn­ing their craft, mas­ter web design­ers “offer­ing a taste” with more sophis­ti­cated, sim­i­lar themes avail­able for a price and so on — but to be made avail­able through Word­Press, they  are rig­or­ously tested by the Word­Press com­mu­nity. That makes a difference.

Brick has been man­aged under for essen­tially all of its eight-plus years (start­ing early 2004) is called Very­Plain­Txt, by Scott Wal­lick. Word­Press has improved its over­all plat­form many times since Wallick’s last upgrade, in July 2008. I liked it because it empha­sized the text and its sim­i­lar­ity to the won­der­ful McSweeney’s Inter­net Ten­dency online journal.

This new theme is The Eru­dite, cre­ated by Matt Wiebe. Classy, sim­ply that. I’ve been moon­ing over it for a long time, won­der­ing when to change, or if some­thing bet­ter would come along. Yes, but not as appeal­ing as this one.

Like Wallick’s, Wiebe’s design has things I’d love to change. There is a way to do that. It’s deal­ing with the pro­gram­ming code directly. Most peo­ple I know who use Word­Press or from-scratch (or nearly so) web design­ers pre­fer to cus­tomize. I have dived in for Brick and the hand­ful of sites I’ve man­aged over the years to mod­ify lines of code here and there.

But I’d rather not. The sense of time pass­ing dis­ap­pears when I do it, and coders love that. I enjoy it, too, but that time is lost to where I’d rather lose track: work­ing on the con­tent. Sure I can design, but I’m a writer.

That said, I will mod­ify this site after a while, when I get a strong urge or, more likely, when I want a good excuse to pro­cras­ti­nate on a writ­ing project.