{"id":1681,"date":"2008-05-25T13:07:32","date_gmt":"2008-05-25T18:07:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1681"},"modified":"2008-05-25T13:10:28","modified_gmt":"2008-05-25T18:10:28","slug":"changing-themes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1681","title":{"rendered":"Changing Themes"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I began the foolhardy task of mucking about with the theme on this site, much like a man throwing rocks at a wasp’s nest for his own amusement. I was carefully balancing a couple of time-sensitive projects. I figured the theme change would be a quick thing, that I could make sweeping changes to the behavior of the site at the cost of just an hour or so. <\/p>\n

Three days and a multitude<\/a> of complaints<\/a> later I realized what I’d gotten myself into, but I didn’t have time to make it right. I patched it up a bit, reinstated the old theme as the default, and made a note to return to this particular dragon’s den when I actually had time to deal with the dragon.<\/p>\n

At the root of my error was the failure to understand just how little freedom I have with the theme of this site. A new blog can put up any old theme they like, but once you have about three years of content behind the thing the site begins to get a little rigid. The following bullet list contains the lessons and wisdom I gleaned from the debacle:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The main content area must be at least 600 pixels wide, or DMotR<\/a> won’t fit. It can’t be wider than that or it will hose the formatting of hundreds of old posts where I have text wrapping around images.\n<\/li>\n
  2. The sidebar has to be about 200 pixels wide, or parts of it will wrap and look stupid.\n<\/li>\n
  3. While people are often running at gigantic screen resolutions, many do so with their web browser in a much smaller window. I can’t make the site wider than 900 pixels unless I want them to have a horizontal scrollbar. (I do not.)\n<\/li>\n
  4. The sidebar has to go on the right, because a lot<\/i> of people object to left-scrollbars, but almost nobody objects to right ones. I do not know why.\n<\/li>\n
  5. The tiling background causes slowdowns for older machines, so the default theme can’t have a repeating background.\n<\/li>\n
  6. Under no circumstances should you mess with your site theme unless you have the time to deal with it afterwards!<\/strong>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Taken together, all of this means I didn’t really have much freedom to change the site if I didn’t want to break things. The only major change I was able to keep was the navbar across the top. Which is cool. I guess.<\/p>\n

    I’ve hammered out the various difficulties. We now have three themes: <\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Lawful Good:<\/strong> The default, with a white background.\n<\/li>\n
    2. True Neutral:<\/strong> Exactly like Lawful good, except with a gradient background.\n<\/li>\n
    3. Chaotic Evil:<\/strong> White-on-black version of the default theme. While this setup tends to scorch my delicate optic nerve, some people really prefer it.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      All the themes should be the same in terms of spacing and functionality. I’m sure things will break, but I’ve got a three day weekend going so I should be able to attend to any required fixes, assuming the problems aren’t at some fundamental design level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      A few weeks ago I began the foolhardy task of mucking about with the theme on this site, much like a man throwing rocks at a wasp’s nest for his own amusement. I was carefully balancing a couple of time-sensitive projects. I figured the theme change would be a quick thing, that I could make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}