This new design sucks.
It’s been a little while since I’ve logged into mendax.org, and I must say that I was shocked, but not necessarily awed by the change in design. I liked the more personal feel of the old design. This feels like it’s trying to be cutting edge, and it falls short.
It seems everyone is trying for the cold, bleak, and technical feel of things these days. It’s why I don’t like a lot of sci-fi. Why does the future always have to consist of metal hallways, metal beds, silver sheets, grey clothing, and bleak living spaces? If this is what the future will become, you can have it. The future sucks.
Not that I want to revert to the days when no one bathed for weeks/months at a time, and beds were filled with economical, albeit it smelly and allergy-inspiring, straw. I like my comfy bed, my sleek Macintosh (which is silver… :/ ), and my best friend TiVo. But I like warm tones… I like to think of things in that lovely amber cast that the movies save for times when things were supposedly simpler.
So, Mr. mendax.org-Creator-Guy… change it to something more personal. Do it!!! Or I swear I’ll whine and bug you. You know how persistent I can be.
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It’s fair to say that I should have posted a proper update to the front page when I changed WordPress themes again, rather than assume everyone knew why it was done in the first place.
I love mendax.org’s old theme, which is rather unique and put together by an apparently very busy Steffen Becker. Recently, he internationalized his theme, which was the last significant update. Since, the WordPress theme community has adapted fancy changes which the average reader may not see, such as AJAX technology and a little something called WordPress widgets, that make the site easier for people like me to administer.
This posed a conundrum: stick with the old site layout, but be limited by what I could do with the site, or switch to a theme that I still thought looked decent (if not quite as cool as Becker’s theme), but that made use of the newer theme technology available. I opted for the latter.
The current theme is called Binary Blue, and is one of four “schemes” that offer a particular layout. I went with the one that I felt worked best with my vision for mendax.org, and also happened to be one of the better WordPress layouts out there, and made very little modification to the code (such as changing the background to black).
The whole point of me scraping my hand-written mendax.org code was because I felt I didn’t have enough time to keep up with the maintenance. Thus, mendax.org switched to WordPress, which is a codebase that’s well-respected in the blogging community and does most of what I wanted mendax.org to be able to do. With this in mind, the idea of coming up with my own unique layout, or even heavily modifying Becker’s theme to include things like AJAX and widgets, is simply an unbearable time obstacle. I would much rather spend the limited time I have writing content for the site.
In conclusion, if Becker ever finds the time and inclination to update his theme, I will happily switch back to it. In the meantime, I’m happy to look over other WordPress themes that others may recommend, and consider their use for the future layout of mendax.org. In the meantime, mendax.org will stick with Binary Blue, and I’ll keep an eye out for new schemes.