Every few years I get a yen to mess around with the layout of this site. The last time i did it was back in September of 2010, when I merged my old regular blog and knitting blog into this single location. I’d been using WordPress for years by that point, and each time I decided to poke around at it, there’d be more and more features I could play with, and fewer things where I needed Richard’s knowledge of PHP to finish things off.
This time around the part that took the longest amount of time was actually scrolling through the bazillion available themes to pick the one I liked, followed shortly thereafter by the time it took for me to install a theme, poke at it, decide it was almost-but-not-quite what I was looking for, and then go do the same with the next contender.
Way, way back when I first decided to get this domain and start playing around on the internets (January of 2000, to be precise), I did every single bit of the design and layout by hand, writing out the html scripts using Notepad. There were WYSIWYG editors available back then but I figured if I was ever going to learn how to write web code, I had to do it from scratch, and so I stubbornly clung to my arcane ways until the advent of Greymatter. Suddenly someone else did the heavy lifting and all I had to do was a bit of tweaking here and there, and by then, hey, html was a piece of cake, so why not. I moved on to MoveableType at some point, until that sort of imploded, and that’s when Richard installed WordPress for me, and I’ve never looked back. But through all of that, there’s always been bits I have had to either edit myself, or get Richard to edit for me.
But it turns out, these days, WordPress themes have these nifty things called Widgets, where all you have to do is drag and drop bits of functionality into the various parts of the page, and poof, it just happens all on its own. This is so very awesome! I don’t have to even *touch* the actual code to make it do what I want it to do. It is magic, I tell you, sprinkled with unicorn farts and fairy dust, or something equivalent.
Anyway. That’s what I did this morning – set myself up with a shiny new layout, complete with randomizing header images of our cats (either current or past) . And yes, I do see the irony in having now firmly embraced the WYSIWYG editor, 13 years on, but I am old and set in my ways and I no longer care!
‘Tis the season for Holidailies.
Love the WP widgets!