I’ve decided it’s time to throw a fresh coat of paint on this place. I’ve had the same theme on this website for several years, and I’ve been looking at some new ones. Over the next several days, if you visit the site rather than read it in an RSS reader or Flipboard or something, you may see that it looks different. It will be as if I’m trying on different outfits – some may linger for awhile, and some may be uncomfortable enough for me to take off right away.
One problem is that the fonts on the current theme seem a bit small. I’ve been looking at several that have better readability. While I’ve found several designs that I like, the biggest problem is with WordPress’s use of “featured images.” You may have noticed that I like to have one large image at the start of the blog post, and I embed smaller images throughout the post. This is to minimize the amount of scrolling one has to do (which is already quite a bit.) If you want to see a larger version of the image, all you have to do is click on it.
I started doing this long before WordPress implemented their Featured Image protocol. In WordPress, and image can be designated as the featured image, and that image will show up in a variety of formats throughout the theme that your using.
The problem is that the featured image MUST be an image uploaded to the WordPress gallery. It cannot be on another site referenced by URL. That means I can’t use any of my Flickr images as Featured Images. I would have to re-upload that image to my WordPress gallery.
I set up my Flickr account specifically to house photographs for this website ‘way back in 2006. I had been keeping my photos on the same site, but managed them through a home-grown system that used ASP and an MS-Access database. I had limited web space, so moving to Flickr let me store photos there, and just use the local space for written content. It worked quite well. Drive space is now cheap, but I write quite a bit and take lots of photos. I still think I’d run low on space locally. Even if I weren’t worried about space, I’d have to upload the images to two different locations, which would slow up my workflow.
I’m sure I’ll find something that will work. I may even just go into the CSS for the them I’m using and change the font size. How hard can it be?
five famous last words. . .