Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

I should be a plastic surgeon because I just gave my website a wicked face lift. This is a design I’ve been working on for quite a while now. I started it last spring/summer when I was thinking about making a blog. By the time I actually got the site up and running, school had started, and I had no time to finish the work. I just figured I’d limp along on Kubrick (the default WordPress theme) until I was able to get my design looking the way I wanted it to look.

This design is (at least in most respects) one that was started from scratch. I borrowed selected bits of code from Kubrick and elsewhere, but I have a good enough understanding of how WordPress works (or how to learn when I don’t) that I was able to just figure out what I wanted things to look like and tell WordPress what to do.

Some highlights include:

• The theme should be ready for WordPress 2.5 (as am I :)), with support for Gravatars.
• “Regular posts” and “Asides” are now displayed differently. Many of my posts (categorized as Attention Deficit) are what I’d consider an Aside. They’re usually short, sweet, and off-topic, and they likely contain a link and very little input by me. Regular posts are generally supposed to contain more input by yours truly (although depending on my mood, this may or may not be true). This is an example of a “Regular Post”.
• Fancy new graphics. They’re everywhere. I’m not an artist. Sorry about that.

And there’s a little more on the way. I’ll be adding ShareThis links to every post. More importantly, I’m going to be assessing the structure of categories on the site. Personally, now that “tags” have been implemented in WordPress, categories seem more like a “post type” to me. For example, an “aside” is a type of post (as explained earlier). A “rant” is another type of post, and so is “news”. A post is “tagged” with key words pertaining to the subject of the post. Some of my categories don’t seem to fit this structure, so I’ll be working on my organizational skills to keep this place as clutter-free and logical as possible. Thanks to blogs like LifeHacker and ifacethoughts, I’ve come to understand the importance of organization and productivity in my electronic life. Now if I could only figure out the IRL version :p.

Let me know what you think of the new design. Don’t be afraid to tell me it sucks. If enough people don’t like it, I may change it back or to something else. If you don’t like all or part of it, let me know what specifically bugs you. Sometimes I feel like the design is somewhat disconnected (maybe because of the 2 ways to display posts on the front page), so this may be something I need to work on in the future as well.

If for some reason you’re interested, the source files for this design will be available on the Colophon (definition).