title: A blogging minimalist link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/a-blogging-minimalist/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 634 created: 2007/09/25 05:24:02 created_gmt: 2007/09/25 05:24:02 comment_status: open post_name: a-blogging-minimalist status: publish post_type: post

A blogging minimalist

When I first moved my own web sites over to WordPress I spent a lot of time trying out the many themes collected under the WordPress Theme Viewer.

After a couple of weeks I’ve settled on 3 in particular, one each for my two information technology related blogs, and another for my personal blog.

As it turns out both were authored by the same individual, Scott Allen Wallick, and can be found on his plaintxt.org site, subtitled “Minimalism in blogging: an experiment out of control”.

One theme I’m talking about is Blog.txt. Another is the slightly more stylish, Barthleme, and finally veryplaintxt. The first is currently being used on eldapo, the second was being used on this site until recently, when I switched to Blog.txt because I think it presents blocks of code more legibly. The last, Scott’s first published theme, is being used on my personal (private) blog (I was editor of my high school newspaper, so I’ve got a soft spot for newsprint).

Although I’ve made some adjustments by modifying sidebar.php and changing some of the defaults for overall page width and base font (in Blog.txt I’ve widened the page to improve the display of the large chunks of source code shared on my technical blogs, and changed the base font to a mid-sized sans-serif), I’m basically very pleased with these themes — sharing the author’s affinity to things minimalist. For my personal blog I like the newspaper-like look of the veryplaintxt theme, and have left the base font as Times Roman in spite of my long-standing loathing of that typeface. It seems to work in this case.

What I’d really like to do is try the open source multi-site version of WordPress (called Lyceum), to see how it performs as on overarching CMS for a collection of sites. Right now Bluehost doesn’t offer it as a Fantastico-installable application, and I’m not yet ready to roll my own. Just yet.

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