“I Feel Like I Look Ten Years Younger”

“I feel like I look ten years younger.” It’s not me saying this–it’s my web log.

Some of my eldest readers might remember a time when I was using bBlog to publish my web log, using the default theme. Eventually I found a theme very similar to the theme I use today, only with a red colouring instead of blue and a photo of a Bic pen rather than the Pilot ExecuGel. This theme was a WordPress theme, so I grabbed a WordPress compatible theme for bBlog and started using it.

A couple of years ago I made the move from bBlog to WordPress 2 and brought along my WordPress 1 theme. The theme felt right at home, but was still working with a sort of “compatibility” layer as WP2 added new theme features that my theme wasn’t using. This wasn’t really a problem because I could continue on with no loss of functionality.

But my theme was getting a little long in the tooth. A couple of people complained about the long list of archive links. Link ordering was out of my control. Searching sucked. Comments couldn’t be nested. And the list goes on to include various other minor annoyances.

Tonight I made the jump to a WP2 theme that is “highly configurable”. From what I can tell it simply means that they give you a bunch of text boxes in which you can edit CSS, and for this they add many kilobytes of your page size. None-the-less I spent the time to transition from the old to the new theme. A couple of you even noticed that I took the site down for a short period during the transition.

Enough with the history lesson; here’s what’s changed:

• domain navigation links moved from the sidebar to the top;
• front page is three columns, now showing recent comments and recent popular posts;
• tags;
• easier access to posts and comments RSS feeds;
• local search replaces Google search;
• no more AdWords;
• link ordering changed;
• archives are available in a drop-down list; and,
• minor changes to design and per-post page layout

The downside of this: the new theme is slow. Combine that with a really slow (read: cheap) web host and the blog effectively becomes really slow. Whether or not this is noticeable I don’t know. To combat this I have installed a caching mechanism, which should help if a few of you happen to visit at once. But please let me know if there are any side effects.

Update: Left sidebar: gone.