Nerve Endings Firing Away

After resisting for more than a year, I finally gave in and changed my theme last night. The previous one had served me well and I persisted with it primarily due to several customizations I had made. But it was getting too clunky and boring. And I wasn’t blogging regularly so why not tinker around in the backend? Since I’m not PHP or CSS guru, I’ve to rely on one of those free themes that are available out there. This theme is designed by Abhijit Nadgauda of iface thoughts. I had downloaded the theme when Abhijit had released it more than a year ago and in spite of looking for other designs, I couldn’t find anything better than this one. I’ve been a sucker for minimalism but at the same time I’ve to try hard to avoid the bells and whistles that come with every new feature that is released continuously for WordPress. However, there is no theme that I can use directly out of the box and usually have to customize it heavily to suit my preferences and tastes. Fortunately, Abhijit’s theme was plain and perfect for such customization. For those who are interested, I’ll just give a rundown of this design’s primary features:

1. The front page of this blog is now ad-free and if you read the blog via a RSS reader, you’ll almost never seen any advertising. Apart from Adsense, I’ve stripped off all forms of advertising including the CPM banners from Adbrite, Project Wonderful, Adify, and Ads Daq.
2. The front page is modified for Inline Asides with the help of AsideShop plugin as recommended by Aditya. Chetan had helped me code the Asides for my previous theme and this plugin greatly simplifies that process without mucking up the code. Additionally, the front page now features excerpts for full-length posts (except the most recent post) for SEO purposes so you may need an additional click to view the entire post.
3. The sidebar features items that are directly related to activities that I would usually blog about. E.g. all pictures I take are uploaded to my Flickr account and the movies I watch are rated and briefly reviewed. I tend to expand some of these in full-length blog posts. I’m trying to find a comparable Book Review plugin but the one that is closest to the movie review one somehow doesn’t work.
4. All navigation features like Monthly Archives, Categories, and Recent Comments and Posts are relegated to the bottom section of the blog. In the earlier design, these features occupied nearly the entire sidebar. The Archives and Categories now are enclosed in a dropdown menu to avoid long and clunky lists. The previous theme for some strange reason didn’t process the code for WordPress tags which I extensively use for full-length posts. The tag cloud on the sidebar features the 100 most-frequently used tags. I might have a separate page for the rest of the tags sometime later.
5. The Search function in WordPress is a known chink in the armor of an otherwise robust CMS. Fortunately, plugins eliminate any such shortcomings. The Advanced Search feature in the bottom bar allows for ordering of search results by relevance as opposed to chronological order in default WordPress search apart from filtering of search criteria by specifying posts, pages, and comments.
6. One of the strengths of this theme design is the ease of enhanced usability. The page links are easily seen and accessible right on top of the page. The earlier theme didn’t do justice to the individual pages especially the new ones like Deli.cio.us Bookmarks The Skip links allow you to jump either to the main content or the bottom bar with a single click. The three RSS options – posts, comments, and email are also easily visible. The wide header space allows me to insert my Twitter status considering I’m quite active on Twitter these days.
7. As in Abhijit’s minimalist and resource-saving designs, this theme largely uses text instead of images. Apart from the Flickr photos, DesiPundit button, and images within posts, the design doesn’t use images thus saving on load times.

Well, that’s about it. Let me know if you notice anything amiss. Otherwise any feedback, good or bad, is always welcome. Now that I’ve a new design, I should be blogging more regularly, right?