No-frills blogging (Updated)

1 August 2008 - Filed under Undecided

One of the things I did straight after setting up my new blog was pick a theme I liked. After a few hours of searching the various WordPress theme directories on the Web, I settled for My Gray Time created by a designer in Italy. Update (14 April 2009): I cannot seem to locate My Gray Time any more.

As I learned more about how WordPress and WordPress themes worked, I started tweaking the theme I had to better suit my functional requirements and aesthetic preferences. Creating and re-engineering what runs on the Web has been my trade, after all. I spent quite a number of hours not just changing colours here and there, but going through an extreme makeover both visually and functionally as well as cleaning up the various inconsistencies, up to a point where my modified theme just didn’t look or behave like the original. While the creator of the original theme had done a great job for which I give full credit, I ended up re-creating and re-organising every single file and image of the theme. The problem, however, was that even after all these changes, WordPress was still saying I was using My Gray Time, which was entirely inaccurate. So I spent a wee bit more time researching how I could properly commemorate and “emancipate” my effort. In the end, I was able to package it into a brand new WordPress theme, which I named “No-frills.”

No-frills as the name suggests aims to deliver a clean, uncluttered, legible presentation of information with what I call a minimalist design philosophy. It’s also lightweight on the screen and comes with a “widget-ready” sidebar. More importantly, I focused my re-engineering effort on two concerns: how to make text as comfortable to the eye as possible; and how to achieve the most printer-friendly output possible when content is printed on paper or saved as a PDF. All in all, it’s a theme built with some degree of ergonomics and practicality in mind.

I might have sounded like a salesperson but No-frills is available for free download and can be applied to any blog powered by WordPress 2.5 or above. It’s been developed and tested on WordPress 2.5 and 2.6 running on Mac OS X and Windows Vista with a combination of the Safari 3.1, Firefox 3, OmniWeb 5.7, and Internet Explorer 7 browsers.

Update (3 August 2008): Technology advances fast. No-frills version 1.2 is out already! I was almost tempted to call this a major update but decided I’m happy to reserve the v2.0 moniker for later. Anyway, here are some of the highlights of No-frills 1.2:

• A re-organised look that leads the viewer’s attention to the latest content
• A much lighter load on the browser
• Improved navigation that corresponds to natural eye- and mouse movements, including in-post timeline-category links and conveniently placed home, print, and scroll-up shortcuts
• Revised typography for enhanced readability
• Visually pleasing icons
• Enhanced printer-friendly output achieved by attentive calibration of cascading style sheets (CSS)
• Even less clutter and visual distractors overall
• An outcome of thorough testing to ensure a highly consistent user experience across different operating systems and browsers
• Readily visible post tags
• Gravatar support
• CSS best practices
• Bug fixes (yes, bugs)

Update (18 September 2008): No-frills is now one of the 360 themes featured in the official WordPress Theme Directory.

Update (14 April 2009): Starting with No-frills v2.0, official No-frills announcements will be posted here.

2008-08-01  »  JK