This probably has no interest to anyone but me, but you may notice a change in the blog theme today. I’ve been dissatisfied with the typography of the blog for quite some time. Today I set out to try to find a theme that had better typography. Man, what a mess!
There are a zillion WordPress themes out there. Some awful, but many quite good. However, finding a minimalist theme intended for writing and reading is surprisingly difficult. They seem to jump from those with no bells and whistles at all (see mnmlist or less or Hemingway Rewritten samples for example) to those that have galleries and seem to be photo driven. A lot of “responsive” themes seem to give ugly results when shown on a nice big monitor as opposed to a tiny phone screen.
I just want to write stuff and have a few side widgets. It has to be capable of supporting code listings, of course, and the few little widgets I use for navigation (archive, categories, and tags). That’s enough for me.
So this is now Two Thousand Twelve, an update to the Two Thousand Eleven them I used previously. There are still things I don’t care for, like the way the blog header and image are laid out, the typography (could be better), ugly links to read the rest of long stories, and on and on. But I’m too lazy to write my own. It isn’t really hard, just tedious (says the guy who has only read the tutorials.)
Dave Winer’s new outliner, Fargo, does most of what I want and seems a great tool. It even integrates with WordPress. Maybe that’s something to look into another day. The Truly Minimal theme looks almost right too.