Plain Text Redesign 17 years, 9 months ago by Martey Dodoo

For a relatively long time (more than a year), this blog used a modified version of the Kubrick theme that ships with WordPress. Since I had invested a substantial amount hacking on the fixed-width theme to make it fluid^[1], I was hesitant to switch, especially since the majority of the themes I saw were going to need major refactoring in order to be up to my standards for a good WordPress theme^[2]

When I heard about the veryplaintxt theme, I knew that it could serve as a proper foundation for a new theme once I saw a screenshot. Since I could not sleep last night, I decided that the time was finally ripe.

My modification of the theme was made more difficult through my use of Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Beta 1. While all of the Firefox betas and nightlies I have tested since well before version 1.0 have been stable and non-buggy, I do not feel any trepidation at the large warnings that Mozilla posts when releasing alpha and beta versions of their software.

Still, my life was made very difficult by the fact that the DOM Inspector (essential for debugging CSS) would cause Firefox to crash when I tried to use it in conjunction with an open browser window. This is especially annoying since I do not believe that the problem occurred in the previous testing release, Bon Echo Alpha 3. If it is a regression, I could not find the bug in Mozilla's Bugzilla. Upgrading to a more recent nightly build did not solve the problem either.

There were also issues related to my ad-hoc integration of AdSense in these pages. The 728x90 advertisments that I previously used on all of my pages were too large for single post pages if a resolution of 800x600 was used - the AdSense ad appeared in front of part of the sidebar! As a result, the affected pages now have an ad with a width of 468 pixels.

In general, the pages work. There are a few bugs in Internet Explorer that I could find, but I figure that I can fix those sometime later.^[3]
--
^[1] Fluid web pages have a variable width, so they expand and contract with the width of your browser window. I like fluid pages because fixed-width pages often have widths of 800 or 1024 pixels, which generally leaves vast amounts of whitespace on the right side of pages. BBC News' current website is a good example of fixed-width design.

^[2] Some necessary features: white background, no header image, two-column layout.

^[3] Internet Explorer is bad; you should not be using it; if you refuse to switch to a better browser, you are just going to have to deal with the bugs on this and other websites.