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.
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.
