Roger had a post up last week about preparing your site for Blaugust. It inspired me to take a good look at my own site. Except instead of some tidying up, I ended up with a full remodeling project on my hands.

I’ve had the same theme since I since I started blogging. I took some time to set it up a week or two before the last Newbie Blogger Initiative and at the time, there weren’t that many options available to a free WordPress.com site. The theme I chose was simple, it was called Plaine for a reason! It included a header and I was able to add a side bar later on. It met my needs at the time. Other than updating the side bar here and there, it hasn’t changed much since.

There’s a couple reasons for that. It was functional enough to do what I wanted it to do, mainly display my posts. I didn’t need fancy features and customizing the sidebar and adding a menu to the header was all I the additions I needed. Plus, the theme didn’t have many options any ways. I think I could change the style of the header and footer and that was about it.

I also assume anyone reading my blog is doing so through an RSS reader so I don’t give much thought site looks like. Though, there has been enough discussions and posts throughout the years that I know that’s not always the case.

The point is, I’ve had my original theme for 10 years now and I wanted a fresh coat of paint. So I went looking for themes.

There are a ton more available. I bet that has to do with being on the WordPress.com Personal Plan now and just more being available in general over the years. While there are a lot of options, there aren’t that many in the style I was looking for.

I wanted something minimalist. I don’t need fancy home page layouts, giant pictures, or a landing page. All I want is a place to display my posts and add some pictures.

There were a number of themes that looked like they would meet my needs but they ddin’t support images, only text, and that was a no go for me. So I landed on the Twenty Twenty-Five theme which looked the way I wanted it to and supported images.

After activating it, I went to customize it, just to change the theme to dark mode. One of the things that bothered me about my old theme was that the text editor in WordPress was blindingly white. I prefer dark mode in all things usually. I tried a few different ways to remedy this on the old theme including using a markdown editor called iA Writer and using the Dark Reader extension in Firefox.

iA Writer was nice to write in, supported dark mode, and even had a full screen, distraction free mode, but it was a pain to reformat the text once I copied and pasted it into WordPress. The text would copy into one paragraph block and I’d have to go through and separate them all out if I wanted to insert an image in between. It was more work than it was worth

Dark Reader worked but made my images look weird in the editor. This wasn’t a deal breaker, I used it for a years but if I was going to change the theme anyway, I wanted dark mode in my editor natively.

Upon going to change the color theme, I realized I could customize the layout of the whole theme if I really wanted to. I started poking around to see what I could do.

Now, I’ve always thought the block editor doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for writing. It has its annoying quirks that I’ve learned to just live with over the years. I could switch back to the classic editor, I know, but I’m used to it now. It makes a lot more sense if you’re using it to lay out a website graphically. Being able to move blocks around makes more sense and provides a lot more freedom to someone who doesn’t want to mess around with HTML and CSS.

It’s still not the most intuitive system, even here. I spent a good few hours wrangling the editor into doing what I wanted. I’m still not 100% sure what the difference between a Template and a Pattern is and why I have to click “edit pattern” before I can add a block when it looks like I should be able to drag and drop it into the list view. I also found myself having to click on areas of the site multiple times to select the block or pattern I needed to edit to get the desired result.

I could have read the documentation, I guess, or watched a video, but I wasn’t that invested. I got by well enough by clicking on things and seeing what changed.

And if you got this far, after 800 words, you might be asking “what did you change?”

Well, for starters, I didn’t like the infinite scroll for posts that the theme originally had. My old theme had an infinite scroll and I just didn’t like the way the way posts weren’t clearly broken up. So I got rid of that, and added a Query Loop pattern thing that pulls up the latest post. Then you can click the next page to see the next post, if you’re so inclined. I now had one post displaying on my home page and I was happy, until I thought, well if someone lands here, reads the post and wants to comment, then they’ll have to scroll back up, click the title to get to the post page and then comment from there. So I went to investigate if I could add the comments to my query loop and, after a bit of finagling, I was able to add a comment box and the comment history right there on the home page. Success! I also included a recent posts section at the bottom of the home page.

I had a little bit of buyers remorse when I realized I couldn’t add my side bar back. I even went looking for my old theme but couldn’t find it. This theme is single column and I bet I could get the sidebar if I really tried, but if I’m honest, I never kept my old sidebar up to date anyway so no big loss after all. The only things that were on the old sidebar that were a functional part of the site were the Archive and the Blogroll.

It felt wrong not having both so I ended up making separate pages for them. The default template for the Archive looked nice with a the Featured Image and post titles layed out in a 4×3 grid but it would not update dynamically if I went to look at posts from a certain month or year so that wasn’t going to work. I had to redo the whole Template so I could pull the right posts. I ditched the grid in favor of a single column with the featured image, post titles, dates, and excerpts. It looks cleaner this way.

The Blogroll is still in progress. I rather liked the way Roger has his with a feed of recent posts and then Blogroll blogs alphabetized. I was able to get an RSS feed going with the latest Blaugust participant posts with a Cloudflare worker to aggregate the the feed to one RSS feed and an RSS block. It’s sort of working though I it’s definately missing some posts whci I’ll try to figure out before tomorrow. Now I need to alphabetize all those wonderful blogs I follow.

Overall, I’m happy with the way the blog looks now. I was going for a more minimalist style and was inspired mostly by all those Bear blogs that joined Blaugust last year. It was fun to tinker around with, I’m sure I’ll change some more in the future now that I have a grasp on doing it.

For now, the remodel is done, just in time for Blaugust to begin. No more time to tweak the blog, only time to write!