Cut the crap

One thing I'm surprised at every few months is how few good WordPress themes there are without sidebars, or at least with fully customizable content within the sidebar.

To me, sidebars with lots of internal links are a sign of pretentiousness and inflated ego. And that's pretty much it.

I'm going to use my own blog as an example. Let's pretend it was written by a guy named Steve (this isn't imagination) who is not me (and this part is):

If I was visiting Steve's blog for the first time, I'm probably there because someone linked me to a specific article on it. Or maybe I found something with a Google search. If I like what I see, maybe I'll read a couple extra articles. Maybe I'll click the subscribe link. Maybe I'll post some venom-filled, ignorant accusations in the comments.1

But being able to view all the posts Steve made in February 2005? Utterly without value. I just don't care. I'm never going to click that link and say to myself "Gosh, I wonder what this Steve guy posted on February 26, 2005?" Not gonna happen. I may search for a specific topic such as Palm, if I think Steve may have written on the topic and I'm interested in what Steve had to say. That's what the search tool is for, after all.

See all that crap beside your blog? Just cut it out. We don't care.

I'll admit my current appearance doesn't do this. View this post as an apology for the cluttered sidebar of the current theme. I'll work on it. I wasn't interested in putting effort into the theme I had, and the Kubrick theme is just too "whoops, I didn't set up my blog yet" in appearance. This was just my pick for "what looks the least like ass?" on short notice.

  1. Okay, I won't do that. [↩]

WordPress 2.7 stops the UI abuse

I installed WordPress 2.7 this morning before coming to work. It's a great upgrade. I want to love the new UI, but I feel it would be the same as loving someone because they finally stopped beating me.

WordPress 2.7's administration UI is a breath of fresh air. Want to make a new post? One click. From any page in it. Common actions in general are one click away. It feels awesome. It even looks classy.

Anyway, if you use WordPress: Get the upgrade. Run, don't walk. Save yourself grief.

I love tags

I think of WordPress's tags as free association. I try to just start thinking of related things and type as many in a short period as I can. And I'll often go back and type more in later. I know this isn't a great system, but I figure over time I can build enough of a tag library that I can start reusing terms.

But I didn't realize they could have spaces in them. That's right; if you're using WordPress, you don't need to limit your tags to URL safe characters. Give it a try.

I plan on updating my tags in the coming weeks to add spaces, capital letters and such. The tag "hall of shame" is much more appealing to me than "hallofshame."

Re-examining first principles

It wasn't until I started hacking at this iPhone theme that I realized an odd thing about WordPress themes:

Almost everyone includes massive sidebars in their themes, filled with stuff that nobody ever uses. What do I mean? Well, as mx pointed out (though not online, I think), the sidebar is the ultimate vanity. Although he went on about this at some length with antipode, I was mostly left to think through the implications on my own.

It's true. Most people who will read this post are either already my friends, have been linked to a post, or have found the post through a search engine because I mentioned something really obscure. The number of people who will want to see my archives is vanishingly small. So I don't want to waste main page space.

So where do we put it? Well, I've noticed that the people who don't put this stuff in a sidebar typically include a link to their archives, a link to their tag map, etc, etc. Why? If someone's interested, why can't I include all of that information? Isn't that information, in a nutshell, what the blog is really about?

So instead of putting all that junk in a sidebar or in separate pages, I've put it in a single page. I'm not really happy with "archives" as a name for this, but it'll do until I pinpoint exactly what this page really is. Maybe it's just "other postings."

New approach to themes

A few times I've started with a complex theme and tried to adapt it. But it hasn't worked for me. So instead, I'm trying a different approach: I'm starting with the simplest, clean theme I can find and adding the features I miss. I picked iWPhone, a theme for the iPhone.

This theme started with no archives, no tag map, and no search function. I've reintroduced archives, but that's it for the moment. Other features will be added as I have time and learn PHP.