I’m using a slightly altered version of the WordPress default theme for three basic reasons. First of all, it’s a good way to get to know the back-end as a user, and to take advantage of the out-of-the-box features of WordPress. Second, it allows me to spend less time tweaking my resume site and more time working on stuff for clients and my day job. And lastly, I tend to save my tinkering for my running site.
I’ve had that site for… well, forever. It started as a Flash site, back when I was first learning the program. If you’re cringing with the idea of what that was like, then you’re not alone. It had too much art and way too much load time. By the time I learned how to maximize Flash for the web, I was smart enough not to build Flash sites.
Next. It turned into a horrifying pile of legacy HTML code. Each page was created manually, with no CMS involved. I used Dreamweaver templates to keep the common elements straight, and God help me, I used the WYSIWYG editor. (Seriously. I really did use that thing.) Even worse, I used tables for layout and my header was an image map. It sounds terrible these days, but those used to be standard practices for designers. If you took a class, they would teach you layout tables. Looking back, it gives me chills.
The content also changed as I went along. It started out as a blog of sorts, although people weren’t really using that word in those days. I would write articles and rants, and post photos. Eventually, I stopped blogging about whatever and started focusing on running events. It was a good way to avoid writer’s block, and frankly it’s kind of difficult to write a daily rant. Maybe it’s easy for some folks, but I can’t rely upon the world to tick me off every single day.
So eventually, I found my way to WordPress. My first theme was pretty rough. Looked horrible, had little flaws everywhere…it was a mess. Then I redesigned it, and I did a little better. Then I redesigned it again, and tinkered, and then redesigned. From that first painful Flash site to the one you’ll find today, there have been 10 versions of that thing. If you count major changes to the WordPress themes, I’m at 15. Holy crap, that’s more than the Doctor’s regenerations!
Recently I went through the whole thing, post by post, for some major changes. I wanted to get rid of a photo gallery plugin, make use of featured images, and just generally clean things up. I wanted to truly separate the content from the presentation. Since many posts from the older incarnations had been left behind like a well-loved scarf on a British actor, I was left with 97 posts to work on. I pulled out shortcodes, removed embeds, and did whatever I could to minimize the markup. The only embeds I decided to keep were from Flickr and YouTube. (I updated the YouTube embeds, but I noticed that the old ones still worked. Good job, YouTube.)
And then, I went through the theme and started over. Nothing fancy. I got rid of WP-Less, converting the styles to plain old CSS before pulling the important ones over. Most were dumped since I was trying to be cleaner. Then I took the HTML5 Boilerplate Theme and added the 960 Grid System to it, building a basic blog with a sidebar. Then I added some PHP snippets to single.php to pop my Garmin maps and Flickr galleries down at the end of the post, based upon a custom field. It seemed easy enough, and I thought I was done.
Sigh.
Nope. Not done. I keep finding little things. I never styled the H3 tags within the articles, and I had some trouble with floated elements and the stuff below them not respecting top margins. There’s other stuff in the posts, too. And yeah, I’ll go through them… but not tonight. Tonight, I think I’ll watch some Doctor Who. You know, the old stuff. With William Hartnell. And maybe I’ll Netflix some Tom Baker tomorrow.