What I did on a rainy Fourth of July

It’s the Fourth of July — and it’s raining like hell. That’s the bad news from an early season Hurricane Aurthur (see the nearby NOAA radar image for an idea of what it’s been like today). The good news? I don’t have to grill until tomorrow, which is forecast to be glorious.

So, what’s a water-logged Fourth of July geek to do? Why, change the theme on his blog and fall in love with WordPress yet again (for what must be the umpteenth time). I’ve been repeatedly burned by Drupal but WordPress never disappoints.

The new theme here is the WordPress 3.9.1 default theme. And that’s big news. Used to be, the WordPress default theme was only useful to check installation.

And that’s what I originally used twentyfourteen, as the new default theme is called, for. I set up a prototype for a client at thevortex.guru using the default theme just to slam some content into the blog to show them how it looks in a blogroll.

But with almost no effort, I was able to create a blog that not only had some classically snarky content but was surprisingly attractive. And since the WordPress default theme is a showcase for the interaction between system functionality and how content is displayed, I discovered that twentfourteen is massively capable. For example, on mobile devices it is just spectacular, or as the current jargon has it “mobile responsive.”

I wondered whether or not I could use twentyfouteen with a WordPress blog that has been online since 2006, like yobyot.com. (BTW, “yobyot” is toyboy spelled backwards.) As you can imagine, that’s a lot of legacy stuff to bring forward.

You are looking at the results of about three hours’ work. Much of that was getting rid of the NextGen gallery plugin which the WordPress measurement plugin P3 identified as a big-time performance hit. And I spent an hour or so futzing with the sidebars and, especially, featured images.

I am, as always, awed by what WordPress can do.

I hope you like it. Let me know what you think.