Today, I’m dealing with this blog at copingmechanism.com. A few weeks ago I decided to go back to using WordPress (again), and dammit I’m going to try sticking with it this time. But, I don’t like any WordPress themes. There are thousands of them, and I can never find one that works for me. Oh, I find a lot of them that make me say, “Ooh, cool!” and install immediately and say, “There, that’s nice!”
The theme I was using up until this morning is “Hive” and it’s a fancy, nice-looking theme.
Magazine layouts like Hive’s are more suitable for occasional full-on articles and that’s not really what I’m doing here. I just want to share some stories, post some quoted links, and show off a few photos. I want things to look nice and be easy to read and navigate. You know, like blogs used to be before WordPress and SEO and relentless self-promotion decided we all needed giant hero images and featured posts and animation and just more of everything.
Hive is nice, and does some nifty things, but this makes it all feel like too much for me right now. Too much JavaScript, too many clever typographical tricks, and way too much animation. I could spend time figuring out how to dial it all back, but what I really want is a reverse-chronological list of full blog posts that readers can easily scroll through without a lot of hoo-ha. It shouldn’t be so difficult to find something to help me do all this without building something from scratch myself.
For now, I’m going fall back to my old stand-by theme, Independent Publisher. It’s not perfect, but it’ll get the job done while I work on something better.
Update April 17, 2021: I may have found one I don’t hate: Graphy. Trying it now.