My New Theme

As you can see, I’ve switched this blog to a new theme. Since I moved the blog to WordPress a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been messing around with themes, on a test site. While I did like the Responsive theme that I’ve been using here, there were a few things I wanted to change. I poked around with quite a few free themes, and explored a number of commercial themes, and found a few that I liked, but nothing that seemed quite perfect. And I was leery about spending money on a commercial theme, without really being able to see the code first, so I could tell whether or not it would be easy to tweak, or if it was coded reasonably well.

In the end, I settled on using Stargazer as a base theme, and created a child theme to fix all the stuff I wanted to do differently.

Stargazer is a free theme from Theme Hybrid that was released late last year. While it looks pretty good as-is, there were a few things I wanted to tweak.

I have my child theme set up to show, on the home page, the full text of the most recent post, and excerpts for the next several posts. And I also changed it to always show full-width on single-post pages, and to show the sidebar on the right on other pages.

The most popular, and most useful, posts on this site are those where I include any program code. Recently, I’ve been doing that with Gists. In the past, I’ve done it with either plain <code> and <pre> tags, or with those tags, and some embedded CSS directives. I’ve set up my child theme to apply a couple of tweaks to both the Gists and the <pre> & <code> tags. I think this will give me some decent-looking code blocks that should be easy to read (and easy to copy & paste from, if needed).

I need to go back to some of my old posts and clean up the formatting on them, though. It always bugs me when I find a post on a programmer’s blog with useful code in it, but the formatting on it is all messed up. Well, I don’t want that to happen here, so I’m going to spend a little time trying to clean everything up.

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