Viola! New Theme!

A Tech article with View Comments posted 8 January 2009.
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I just got done implementing the Vigilance theme for my blog. I had started out working on my own theme, but I am a terrible designer and my site was very… iffy. With a very few minor modifications, though, Vigilance is working great. I blame Dean for the idea.

Rather than tossing all my ideas and starting over, though, I was able to easily pull in some of the key features I wanted to keep. You’ll notice below this post is a blue bar and no title. That used to be a full post under my old design, but it was always intended to be an “Aside” – a quick, one-off comment like you might find on Twitter or another microblogging service.

It was also easy to modify the template to do away with categories. With the advent of native “tags” in WordPress, I began to feel like there were two overlapping systems of navigation imposed on the site. “Hmm… I might write about this again. Do I make this a tag? A category?” The only compelling argument I could think of for retaining categories was that categories would allow users to subscribe to subsets of my site through RSS feeds. However, almost nobody who reads my site did that, and I didn’t want the hassle. I decided to ditch the categories and stick with tags, as they give a little more freedom and granularity.

Other than a few tweaks to my widget bar, a few color changes, and some custom images for the site, little has changed on the inside. But it sure is a lot shinier, and I think it’s a good platform for working on new stuff in the future. I also got a chance to play with the git version control system, which is slowly enticing me away from Subversion. Thanks to Jestro for the excellent, open source, freedom software theme.