I’ve settled on Brad Thomas’s “Admired” with the light white skin as the new theme for this blog. It’s a relatively new theme and is being actively maintained with a support forum. which relieves my main worry about my old Live Steam theme – it’s not going to fall out of sync with the WordPress engine any time soon.
I put a significant amount of effort into finding a theme that could carry forward the clean, minimalist look of Live Steam. It wasn’t easy; most WP theme designers are in love with styles I find fancy, fussy, and overproduced. Even the default skin on this one is a bit too heavy for my taste, but the light white skin and a bit of font tuning has produced a look I find satisfactory.
Not perfect, though. The designer made a common mistake – too much use of px dimensions in the CSS. The result is poor presentation on displays that are either extra large or have a higher than 72dpi pixel density, like my Samsung SyncMaster 1100DF. Also the design is a bit too whitespacey, though not nearly as bad as the WordPress default TwentyEleven theme I had previously been experimenting with.
I’ll be doing some bug-fixing and tuning to fix these problem (and will push the changes upstream to the designer, if he’ll take them). So you may notice the look of the blog shifting and tightening up in subtle ways.
For those of you interested, I’ve put my variant of the theme on gitorious at
git://gitorious.org/wordpress-themes-collection/admired.git
If you tried to clone one of my previous theme repos and got a permissions failure, it’s because I slipped up and gave out the form of the repo URL that only a committer can use. The above should work for anyone, not that there are any changes there yet. There will be shortly, I’m going to start on the px dimension cleanup today.
(Yes, I do install new theme versions in my blog’s copy of the theme with git pull. Run remotely via ssh – look, ma, no hands!)