The site’s design is beginning to feel stale again. I’m popping in at least once a day, just to check that everything is A-OK, and now I’m starting to get too used to how things look around here. The current theme, the Editör, was introduced a little over a year, and one year seems to be the expiration date for most of the designs I’ve used on this site.

There is an almost infinite amount of WordPress themes available, both free and premium. And, man, have I looked at a lot of them to find the right look, feel, and feature set. I was close to shelling out $50 for a theme that probably would have worked without too much tweaking, but decided I couldn’t rationalize spending that much money now on something like that. So, in the end, I’ve resolved to trying a basic, but clean, open source theme called Independent Publisher.

Independent Publisher is a good staring point for a theme, but it has a few shortcomings, most of them related to navigation. But it’s nothing a few tweaks can fix. And since it’s all open source, maybe I can contribute something back to the original project. I’ve already had one pull request approved, so things are moving along.

The plan is to make enough changes to the CSS so that my highly customized A Picture a Day and A Book a Month sections look all right, then activate the theme. That means that many features, like the use of my very own wp-days-ago WordPress plugin, will disappear - but it won’t be anything you can’t live without. The actual content will still be here, and I’m aiming to gradually add everything that goes missing again over time.

Update: And we’re live! A lot of missing features, and some minor bugs. But that’s to be expected after only four or so hours of work. I’m way past my usual bedtime, so it’s time to head off to sleep. If you notice any major issues, please let me know.