An interesting article on The Blog Herald today made me take a fresh look at my site and realise I'm guilty of blog clutter. Gone is the old design along with many extras features from the sidebars.
How quickly a nice clean Theme become a garbage dump for gadgets and gizmos. The sidebar is notorious as a great dumping ground for every widget, Plugin, and gadget around.
I chose majordojo's Cutline Theme initially for the clean layout and simple design, keeping the style with two columns instead of three. Unfortunately, this theme did not display well in Internet Explorer, even after modifying the stylesheet. The whole site displayed in uppercase in IE, and the content has a dotted line under everything. The navigation bar was way off to the right but adding a line to the stylesheet fixed this bug. Some more time spent on the CSS probably would have ironed out the rest of the bugs but after many hours and page refreshes I gave it up.
Using the current Mid-Century theme required installing a new template set. Rather than editing every template, I created a new blog and imported all the entries and assets across. The only change is the blog id number.
After some minor modifications to the stylesheet, for extended entries and trackbacks, and adding names and descriptions to assets to take full advantage of the gallery feature, I was very satisfied with the final product. My thanks to Jim Ramsey, the designer for Movable Type, who made this theme available also uses it on his own site. A few more style tweaks are in order to make this site distinguishable in its own right.
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