“Cogito, ergo sum” said the parrot
Geez, I’ve been under a rock it seems. The Prologue2 WordPress theme and the Press This! bookmarklet suddenly converted blogging into so much more fun! I’m kinda peeved that I didn’t do this sooner! Try it, you’ll love it!
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Following my previous post on blog designs that are boring, I’ve started realstii.com as an experiment. I want to use it mainly for a little more serious thoughts. Thus far, it is not working out too bad, since it doesn’t take forever to customize those posts in that way. What does tend to take a little time is the imagery, but I’m sure as I get better it would become quicker and easier to do.
I’ll admit to this: It won’t be a mainstream model any day soon. It is a little harder than I initially thought and I do all the post markups by hand. People without fair HTML and CSS knowledge will not cope at all. We can always work on some WordPress plugins to streamline the process!
As for this blog, I’ll do it the way Nic has done it. Using the simple, quick to publish Prologue2 theme to do Twitter-like updates. I do like that. Also, I’m changing the flow in that random pics and photos won’t go to pic.stii.co.za anymore, but everything gets drawn here. One blog to rule them all!
I’ve spent enough time musing and fuming about this. Everyone for himself and the devil for us all. Enjoy it, else you’re not doing it right!
I’ve been thinking about the way our blogs and templates look for a loooong time. It is boring. Even the best looking WordPress blogs like Matt Mullenweg and Sue Rutherford‘s blogs (which are fantastic designs) is, or rather become, boring. It might not be boring the first or second time you visit it, but after a while you don’t even notice the design anymore, not true?
Why then do we stick with our same old boring templates post after post? Can you imagine you buy your favorite glossy magazine and page through it only to see every single page looks exactly the same? Yes, you may argue “…but print is dead!”. Newsflash! Our medium is boring. I’ll rather be dying than be boring. So why do we refuse to draw on years of research on design? When we were still based in Media City in Cape Town amongst the magazines I talked to a couple of the editors and I basically wanted to know how they design their look and feel? It turns out that it is a science. You may think they only take a bunch of words, slap in a bunch of good looking pictures and BAM! Print it, ship it. No, not quite… A lot of thought goes into the design and layout of individual articles. I’m sure not all magazines take that approach, but basically the good ones do.
Don’t get me wrong. I think theme designers out there do a great job at making themes unique and very pretty. Awesome job guys! It is just that if you read it regularly, it becomes boring. Have a look at Dustin Curtis‘ blog. That is an amazing way of doing articles on a blog! It is definitely a step in the right direction.
Have a look at some of his posts and you’ll get the idea. The post is the main focus, as it SHOULD be. No sidebar. There should not be one IMHO. Looking at my stats (not that I think that is anything to go by) a very small amount of clicks goes to sidebar links. VERY SMALL. So what is the point? No, point. Yes, it sucks at the moment, but even before this crappy design it had very little clicks.
Now people that know me would agree that I’m a crap designer. Doing posts like Dustin’s would require that you not only put thought into your writing, but also your post layout and design! What a bloody mission, I’ll admit, but it may well be a worthwhile mission. Lets try and see.
Since my old theme broke when I upgraded to WordPress 2.8, I thought I’d systematically build a new theme. It is a work in progress and will probably stay that way for some time to come. I’ll work on it as time sees fit. And time is not kind to me lately. I find it very hard to recognize my ass from my elbow. :P
This time round I won’t take any old theme out there and mould it to fit me. I’ll roll my own. I also have a few ideas for plugins which I’d like to throw out there, but patience is a virtue people. With me, you’ll have to have an incredible amount of patience…
I’m temporarily reverted back to my old theme. When I upgraded to WordPress 2.8 I got a very obscure problem with the Ajax functions when writing a new post. Not much useful information other than:
'Syntax error, unrecognized expression: [@href^='#']'
Big help that is! :P I’ll debug the bugger soon when I have more time and had some decent sleep… If any of you have any suggestions in the meantime, they will be more than welcome!
Software developer at Afrigator.com
Love Python, do PHP.
