Redesign!

The last time I made any significant change to the design of this blog was when I moved it from being a guest on editthispage.com to my own domain. That was in 2005, and at the time, I had to ensure that the blog would be readable by my Mom on her 800×600 screen. So I took a then-new WordPress theme and adapted it to my needs by putting it onto a piece of wood and banging a few nails through it.

My original design constraints became irrelevant more than five years ago, but every time I thought about changing the appearance of the blog, I thought about the mass of CSS and PHP I’d have to deal with and put the project aside for another day. Or year.

This week, though, I started assisting the Webmaster of
the Los Gatos Silver Tongued Cats Toastmasters club in moving our site from FreeToastHost to WordPress (a project not yet complete), and he showed me how easy it was to make changes using modern themes and their associated widgets. So I spent this afternoon updating this blog to use the Weaver theme; the hardest part was figuring out how to get my Google AdSense to display where I wanted it (under the title) at the full width of the page (the answer: put the AdSense code in as a snippet instead of using the header widget).

I’m not sure that I’m finished with the redesign, but it certainly seems more modern (and less tiring to read on a widescreen display). Comments are welcome, of course.