New Look!

If this is not the first post you have read here on my blog, than you may have noticed some changes – since this is a blog about Internet related stuff, I guess I should tell you about them…

First, I decided to make my blog the main page for my domain.  Well, I guess this is something that kind of happened on its own over the last year as I slowly stopped advertising www.chrisgrundemann.com in favor of weblog.chrisgrundemann.com, since this is where all the new content is!  So I finally gave in and did away with the couple static pages in my html root directory and moved don’t panic here in their place.  You can now access my blog via www. or weblog. and the content that used to be at www has been included here and here as pages.

I also changed my WordPress theme.  I have been looking at the Thesis theme from DIYThemes for a couple of months now and last week I finally took the plunge and bought a developer license.  The thing about Thesis however is that it is not a typical WordPress theme.  Most themes for WP are closer to what I would call skins; they change the look and feel of the blog, some to a greater extent than others.

Thesis on the other hand is more of a customization framework than a skin; in fact there are now a number of skins available for Thesis.  Thesis allows you to control some very advanced features / aspects of your blog right from the administration panel.  From meta data to in depth display options and column layout to complete font control – the options are just a few mouse clicks away with Thesis – wonderful!

One side effect of this is that installing Thesis for the functionality meant giving up my old theme which I had chosen for the looks.  But I really liked those looks!  And I did not want a “plain” Thesis look to my site, since it is becoming so popular (the theme, not my site ;)).  Although I could have searched through Thesis skins for one that I liked, I chose instead to develop / code my own.  After all, one of my main intentions when deciding to launch a personal website was to learn more about web development!

As you can see I have done just that.  I took the images and colours used by my previous theme – a slightly modified version of Black-Soul by Themes Database (it appears that this theme is no longer available) – and built a custom skin for my Thesis install.  I took the opportunity to address many of the design elements which I had not been totally in love with and to add some new twists that I really like.  As with anything that I customize, it is likely to be a perpetual work in progress – with changes and tweaks coming as I find cracks…

So; what do you think about the new look?  Is there anything you love? Loathe? Do you have any suggestions?