I’ve overhauled many blogs many times over the years, and this time around I embraced WordPress’ emphasis on customization without coding and installed the excellent default theme, Twenty Twenty. This saved me hours of hunting for themes (which often turn out to be expensive, crappy, or both) and more hours tweaking their code.
But an overhaul always entails work, so I did some:
- Current-gen WordPress is built around using “blocks,” and the Twenty Twenty theme offers some neat options for combining blocks on pages; I played around a bit with those.
- As a result, the about me page is now a little personal history of the 21 years I’ve spent writing about, and creating stuff for, RPGs on the internet. My published work page is slicker, and I’ve updated a gaggle of out-of-date links.
- A bunch of stuff no one used is sort of tucked away now, like the list of posts by category (it’s in the footer) and the complete list of post tags (here, and in the footer). My blogroll kept shrinking as I took the hobby’s bad actors and their apologists off of it, so I scuttled that months ago; it won’t be coming back.
- All the sidebar links to popular posts on the blog went away, and I liked those — so I brought them back on a dedicated page accessible from the top menu.
- The main page is back to being the blog, not my CV. I’ve pulled back from the RPG industry (though not from the hobby!), making the CV stuff less important on the site — and I want to focus on starting to blog again, which this should help with.
- I’m kind of digging Twenty Twenty’s default colors, although I never would have imagined that taupe background/black text, fuchsia links, and a white header/footer would look good! Every time I fiddle with them in the customizer, the results look worse; the default is probably here to stay.
- I updated the site’s favicon to match the snazzy new logo.
This new theme is also much more mobile-friendly than the old one, which is awesome. Mobile users account for about 35-40% of Yore’s traffic and my previous two-column newspaper-like theme from 2012 was less than ideal on mobile.
Honestly these types of blog maintenance posts are never all that exciting — but another thing I’m embracing, thanks to the shake-up of migrating from G+ to Twitter a year ago, is just kind of dashing off my thoughts, not worrying overmuch about getting every detail perfect, and being myself. This sort of post is part of that.