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Out With the Old, In With the New [Theme]

Today, I’ve introduced a theme change to this blog, and I hope you like it. As you can probably tell, the look and feel here are far different than the last design. Over the next little while, I’ll be working out the smaller issues and making an effort to clean up the overall look. But, for now, please take it for a spin and let me know what you think.

Why did I do this? The most important reason: To improve the readability of this site. With the previous theme, it did not change for different devices and screen sizes. If I was going to stay that way, I’d be leaving out mobile users (who don’t like zooming in every time the page loads). I hear you, and this theme will respond better to your needs. Over time, I’ll be adding some cool and useful features as I utilize the theme more. I’m excited to see what comes of this.

The theme I’ve changed to is called Orca. It has a clean layout, but also includes some basic features that make my life a little easier.

What did I have to change to get it to this point? Several things. Here’s a list:

1. All gravatar links needed to be changed to https://secure.gravatar.com to make the full page secure. I was going to remove Gravatars completely, but they’re there for now.

2. Many of the open graph tags needed to be added manually. The theme supports a small subset of the details I needed. All of that is found (strangely enough) in functions.php

3. The site is built to be responsive to desktop and mobile devices. I have been testing with all sorts of various scenarios and device viewports. Hopefully, this works as I expect it over time.

Still left to do

1. Bring back Facebook comments. I’ll be working on that next, and I don’t expect it to be too difficult.

2. Clean up element spacing.

3. Correct some of the coloring of text and links, etc. They are on the defaults right now.

I’m sure I’ll think of more things over time. For all the readers, thank you. I appreciate your patience and hope you like where this is going.

Update: I’ve returned to the old theme, for now, due to some difficulties.