Changing Themes After 4 Years

One day last week I was a little bored at lunchtime so I started clicking on the Wordpress Dashboard links to different developer blogs.  Turns out Wordpress 3.6 is coming out soon and it’s going to focus on bringing post formats to the fore and creating a consistent way of handling them within the database. I had no idea this was introduced back in Wordpress 3.1. I don’t know if I missed the notification or if it didn’t mean anything to me because I hadn’t used Tumblr yet. Here are two great explanations: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/post-formats/ and http://wpdaily.co/future-post-formats/ . If you don’t feel like reading those, basically think of how when you make a post on Tumblr it asks you if it’s an image, post, link, etc. That determines the interface it gives you and, depending on your Tumblr theme, determines how to present the information you put into it. Given that one of the post formats is Annotation (meant to be a short post) and given that I quickly grew tired of Tumblr and how it doesn’t have a proper commenting system, I’m probably going to use that for shorter, less fleshed out posts rather than having a Tumblr blog.

Also, for the first time since starting this blog, I’m thinking of going with the new default Wordpress Theme: Twenty Thirteen. It seems to beautifully support the post formats and seems to be quite a great design compared to the bare, blue header theme of the original Wordpress.  I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with the theme since I’ve been looking into some professionally designed themes. They seem to go for about $50 on average, but considering I’ve been ok with this theme for the past 4 years, it’s not that much per year. And I’ve seem some pretty incredible themes.

As I looked at Twenty Thirteen and other themes, I realized that the current chic is a blog that doesn’t look like a blog - eg no sidebars with categories and tag clouds and so on. After looking at most of those themes, my site seems so claustrophobic. Even Twenty Thirteen only reluctantly offers a sidebar. (As you can read in their comments introducing the theme). I may not even bring back ads in the new theme and may get rid of widgets like flickr, raptr, etc or at least move them to the footer.  We’ll see.  Once the new version is released and I move to the new theme, give me some time while I experiment with some different ways of presenting the blog.
As usual, here are some archival images to remind me of how the blog looks with the current theme:

Past theme changes:

/2009/02/05/changing-themes-again-2/

/2008/04/09/changing-themes-again/

/2007/09/30/a-reminder-of-my-previous-theme/

Looking back through the old ones it’s interesting to see how my blog and topics I blog about have changed and evolved.  It’s a nice little bonus that I got while documenting what the blog looked like.

• Post-Formats
• Wordpress
• Wordpress-Theme