It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you, without a strong rhyme to step to.
Eric B & Rakim – I know you got soul (1987)
Every now and again it pays to take a break from blogging, from technology, from everything, and concentrate on something else. Call it a break, a recharge, whatever, it really helps focus you on where you should be. And that is what I’ve done.
Now that I’m back I’ve made some decisions about the direction of Fun with WordPress, and where I want to be, so I have made a few changes.
The biggest immediate change is to the theme, or rather the themes that I will use. My last theme was complex and, because it was designed to work with Habari and WordPress, complicated to change. In general that is fine, because I have the knowledge, but it doesn’t reflect the experience of WordPress that most people have. Given the amount of criticism I heap on WordPress and the assumptions I make about the experience that other users have, I think it is important that I have the same experience.
As a result of that decision I am now using a great theme called WPUnlimited. Importantly I am using the options and tools that come built into the theme and not diving into the pages and code to change things. I am still trying to find the look that I want, but I don’t think it will take me too long. I will write a bit more about my experience with it, over the next few days.
With the change of theme also comes a change of comment system. I have been using Disqus for a while now but it started to lose its sheen and I am now back to the standard comment system. I will write a little about that soon as well.
Another change I have made, for the same reason, is to move another one of my blogs, a blog that I only use sporadically, called Fun with Opinions to WordPress.com. This will be my first ever foray into the world of WordPress.com but I think it is probably important for me to understand the differences.
There are other philosophical differences in the way I intend to approach the blog which will become evident over time, but for now I am back in the room and excited about what people are doing with WordPress.
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It certainly seems as though it will make things easier. The old theme was particularly difficult as it had an extra layer on top of the API to make the two platforms output content in a consistent way. That meant that when I wanted to do something new I had to write a new function to do it.
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I did a similar thing a while back by switching everything on my sites to off the shelf stuff (albeit some of it is my own products). It’s quite interesting seeing how the masses use the software. As a bonus, it does make maintaining your site a lot easier!