a new look and a (partial) admission of defeat

While it’s tempting to try and do everything myself, using the work of others makes more sense.

For years I’ve been talking about my new theme. It was going to be lovely, it was going to use things like JQuery and BlueTrip. It was going to show my technical credentials as understanding HTML, Progressive Uplift & all that good stuff. It was going to pull in data-feeds from around the web.

In short, it was going to be a most awesome theme.

It’s just a shame then that I’m not proficient enough to do this. Much like doing the revision timetable instead of revising, I’d think about Version Control, and editors, and local development instances. I was great at the meta-work, less good at phasing development and the design work.

Eventually, I probably could just about knock something together, and it’d work in Safari on the Mac. It might work in some versions of Firefox, and IE. But it would always be a bit hit and miss for compatibility, and I’d always be playing catch-up to new features in WordPress.

So instead I used the new TwentyTen, the new WordPress 3.0 theme. It’s nice, compatible and configurable. And I have more time to write actual posts, instead of spending endless time deciding on the <div> structure.

I still have ideas on clever data feeds though, but they can wait.