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My new theme is finally done! You can see it all around you now, like the Matrix. I really liked my old theme and I’d been using it for about 1.5 years before the change, but I had feedback Chung and [[Trench]] saying white text on black background wasn’t such an ideal reading environment. In this new theme, I still get my blackish (granite) background, well, I guess it’s still white font on a dark background.

But hopefully you like it, or I’ll have to customize this theme, which is actually quite easy.

This current theme is Imagination by CSS Jockey, Mohi Aneja. He’s basically built a layout which you can then customize in terms of colors to your heart’s content right from the Wordpress Admin, no CSS knowledge necessary. Well documented for idiots like me as well. He gives a number of color themes to the layout, so if you like a more blue theme, or more white theme, he already has it pre-built in.

He’s simply done an amazing job, and the theme is free. 

Before deciding to go with this theme for good, I had hired Jai from http://www.blogohblog.com/ to finish out the Blamatic theme for me. Ah…that didn’t work out. I liked Blamatic a ton, but just ended up loving Imagination before finding someone in Vietnam to finish Blamatic for me. Pat, Blamatic’s designer, did tell me that another developer is working to finish it soon, so that’s another theme I recommend.

Some of the major differences between the new and old look are:

• Versus the old three column theme, I think this theme feels simplified but more focused and still with a strong aesthetic.
• This theme’s not fluid width, so if you’re on super high resolution, then you’re seeing the text take up a very small part of the screen.
• Moving from two widget columns to one, I had to drop my Last.FM widget and reduce the number of pictures for my SmugMug Widget to 1. At first I wanted to show everything about me, widgets galore, but once I accepted the one widget column, I realize it helps me focus more.
• I’ve now added widgets for Most Recent Posts and Most Popular Posts and News From Vietnam, which is an RSS feed of Chao Vietnam on BlogSpot. I’d rather show articles from Intellasia, but it’s banned on some ISPs in Vietnam, including mine. If you go to the Chao Vietnam, you start to question where these stories are coming from, but I’ve looked up enough articles to know they’re coming from real newspapers- don’t just the site on how it looks. Last weekend, I saw that a bunch of articles on the website were from the English version of Thanh Nien daily, so I think it’s fairly safe to read in the sense it’s not made up gossip garbage.
• I really liked to show one blog at a time the way my last theme did. I don’t think it made so much sense to go with one again in the new one, but I’ve limited the default view to latest 3 blogs rather than the 5 or even 10 other bloggers use. I don’t feel that the blog home page should be so long, and I also know the 30 people who come here each day aren’t reading this site like they would Kotaku. People are mostly coming here from searching and just reading a specific article.
• I’ve added a new favicon! If you see a star, you may need to hit Ctrl-F5 to refresh your cache, but you should see a smaller version of this half US and half Vietnamese flag. My old favicon was probably unrecognizable unless you knew my old dinosaur toy logo, so I wanted something a little more immediately understandable. I just took two pictures of the respective flags, cropped them in Powerpoint (that’s right, I edit photos in Powerpoint), combined and resized them to square dimensions. I like it, it’s Vietnamese-American, and I hope no one else has done it yet.

In the change for a new theme, I’ve been reading and researching a lot about Wordpress, including speed optimizations. I’ll be posting about my experiences and lessons to share over the next week or so. Hopefully, you feel that the site is reasonably quick now, especially if you’re in Vietnam. I’ve also decided to become more visible online, so I have some ideas on how to build a bigger audience for this site, even though I talk about nothing interesting or even focus on one particular subject. And I’m not a hot girl.

But I believe and more on that later as well too.

Anyway, I hope you like the new look, and feel free to give your thoughts!

And… here’s one last look at the old theme:

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Blog, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.