A new blog design - Dialectical subtlety
I updated my blog layout. Things are pretty messy in the past. The colors did not look right, the links aren’t working and I lost interest.
Theme: Dialectical subtlety
The key focuses of this theme are elegance, readability and simplicity.
Some powerful WordPress features - such as previous post links, categories and trackback information - are sort of removed or made less obvious. Tags are preferred over categories too, it is also the main method to sort the posts.
Comments are important. I anticipate long comments so a lot of tests has been focus on long comments looking right. My previous problems with comment are that they look kinda boring as a whole and no one bothers reading them. Quite a bit of time is spent on polishing the look of visitor comments.
At the bottom of each page is some random posts. I haven’t really thought of what to put there. Random post is a temporary thing. I intend for some sort of popularity statistics to be used there. But, till today, I only have 34 unique visitors so there really isn’t a point at the moment.
Finally, the layout has to work with my favorite browsers Safari and Opera. It now works in all the latest browsers - Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9.27 and Safari 3.1. Unfortunately, it is not without some IE-specific rules, it’s caused by the dates at the footer.
Regarding the name
Honestly, I have no idea what it meant. I wanted to call my theme ‘Subtlety’ originally but some web searches lead me to find the words dialectical subtlety. I just went ahead and named it ‘Dialectical subtlety’. It’s some philosophy thing.
Some plugins I use
I use Takayuki Miyoshi’s very neat Contact Form 7 for my contact page. The ShareThis plugin that you see in each individual post. The footer does not use a plugin, I just slap PHP codes all over. I’ll probably share it in a later post.
Future development
If this theme goes right, I plan to implement it at my other blog with slight color change and really get criticism this time. I wonder how it would be like to so many SQL queries. My host would probably be unhappy again.