Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

As you may have noticed, the look of my blog changed. I did what I call a “reboot” (turns out a lot of other people call it the same too) when you change your theme from one to another overnight with lots of modification and testing. I’d been using the lovely k2 theme for nearly a year now, and I was seriously getting bored of it. The trouble with most themes is that most of them are designed by someone just interested in getting a few backlinks so they slap on a few curved corners, add a gaudy color scheme and release it as a theme and hope that people download it.

Back in the old days, (I’m using this phrase a lot lately, it scares me), very few people released wp themes and they were all top notch high quality themes with no X theme remixed and Y theme reloaded as wee see a tad too often nowadays. I judge a theme by the font. Many don’t notice it, but using good fonts is an art in itself, and that’s what all the best themes have in common. I mean what is k2 without it’s trademark lucida grande based font, and so on. I actually tweaked the css of this particular page to use a mix of many fontfaces that looks particularly nice.

Anyways, the most important thing that I did this time was to make up my mind and tell myself that I was gonna have to finish up the theme modification tonight, and I did. I was surprised that I settled on a theme, fixed it to work in Internet Explorer 6(which absolutely positively sucks btw) and also got the adsense in and made it to work in wordpress 2.2(which also sucks btw, but more on wordpress 2.2 later, those widget embedding sobs ruined the subtle theme)

So I picked a simple theme, with a decent color scheme, no frills, no seo bullshit, just a nice, pleasant and clean theme. And I started doing the body work on it, and was done surprisingly soon.

I don’t know if I’ve written about this before, but I have this horrible problem that I end up trying to start over a project whenever I’m in the middle of one. I in fact tried on six themes and all of them had some quirk or the other, either the design wasn’t right or it was using up too much space or something. and then I screamed

“Enough is enough!!!! I’ve had it with these mofoking themes on this mofoking blog!!!”

And I pulled up this theme, and made a neat header with photoshop, and fonts downloaded from Smashing Magazine related sources. Added support for a few plugins, decided not to bother with utw, or any other thing, as I’m not going to be trying to build up traffic through traditional methods.

And at 11:58 pm, two minutes to midnight, it was done. I uploaded the final theme, with all the plugins enabled. There was a bit of work to be done, but most of it was over.

An endnote, I’m very happy with the design right now, it’s simple, clean and it’s more about me rather than about looking good. I just renewed my domain name recently, and I’ll be releasing my plugin tomorrow, and I have new hosting. But the best thing of all is that I’m getting projects of mine cleared out and getting them out of the way. I won’t be touching wordpress themes for a while now.

[Update]I noticed Sindhu, also simultaneously rethemed her site, with a theme I’d also considered earlier[/update]