Well, as you can see, I’m trying out a new theme on the site. I used a tweaked version of the default WordPress theme for ages, and last night I just decided that it looked… old. So this morning I woke up and spent an hour or so looking through themes on the WordPress site.
Although I’m not really excited about the dark blue header, I do really like the rest of the theme, especially the giant font. As I get older, I realize that I don’t like reading long articles in tiny Arial type, so I find this theme much easier on the eyes. And unlike a lot of other WordPress themes, this one more or less worked right out of the box. I did have to tweak a few things, so let me summarize the changes for you now:
– I removed the “Archives” widget from the sidebar. WordPress, by default, puts a monthly summary of your posts in a widget called “Archives”. The thing is, once you’ve had a WP site for a couple of years, the Archive widget becomes extremely long, and there’s no way to compact it (say, by having a collapsible hierarchy for previous years). I’d been using a plug-in called “Collapsible Archives” which was supposed to collapse all previous years’ posts and only display the current month. However, a bug in a new version of the plug-in listed the titles of all posts in the current month, making the list almost as long as it was without the plug-in. So I disabled the plug-in and removed the widget from the sidebar.
– In its place, I created an Archive page, which does exactly what “Collapsible Archives” used to do, only on a separate page, therefore reducing clutter on the home page. Beware that the plug-in uses JavaScript, so it takes a few seconds to load.