Whimsical.Nu redux

(Mic test, hello?)

I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth. There’s too little of Singapore to fall off of it already ;) I’ve been journaling and twittering, but hardly ever blogging for the time being, and my falling-out-of-love with my older layout just made it worse. So, a new layout! I’ve experimented with 1.) customizing other people’s layouts and 2.) not bothering with customizing other people’s layouts, but somehow nothing ever sticks. Maybe pre-made themes and layouts is just really for my journal, eh?

That said, this layout has been around three months in the making! I have had two other layouts that I’ve tried to work with, but I haven’t gotten to coding it up when I got tired of them; let’s hope this one sticks for a good bit. It had better stick–this is probably one of the most involved themes I’ve done, on par with–probably exceeding–my last theme for Indiscripts.

So of course I will have to point out just what I loved about making this theme!

1. Slide-out tray. That “+” you see on the upper-left? Yes, that slides out (okay, it widens out…I spent half a day trying to figure out how to make it slide out but then I couldn’t be bothered) to reveal site menu and a couple of things you’d usually see in a blog sidebar. Not a lot, because it’s all just noise and clutter. Some menu items also expand.
2. Category menu. If you’re looking at the blog index, you won’t see anything, but browsing through a category or viewing a single post page will replace the category menu item on the left with a HUGE tab. *pets it*
3. HTML5. I don’t fancy feeling like such a beginner all over again, that’s for sure. I’ve started to familiarize myself with some HTML5 tags, but I fear this might be a repeat of 1998: Angela bungling along putting weird tags in weird places.
4. Whimsical.nu logo! It’s not very inspired, I know. I’m not a logo designer person. But I like it anyway.
5. Comments form! Come on, I know you want to click it. I’ve never really changed out the WordPress comments form layout before (except for *drum rolls* that last layout in Indiscripts), but doing this was quite fun.
6. Single post next/previous link toggle. My, that was a mouthful. Now, if you wanted to cycle through previous and next posts in the same category while looking at single post pages, you can click on the placement indicator in the paginator at the bottom of the post, and change the paginator to cycle through the category instead of the chronological next/previous post. This needs a bit more work: a way for the setting to be “sticky”, for example.
7. Simpler category link. Now you can get to each major category by going to whimsical.nu/category-name instead of needing to use whimsical.nu/category/category-name. This makes it much easier to share my top category links without it needing to be within the context of the whole blog: whimsical.nu/gamer, for example, looks like a standalone link than whimsical.nu/category/gamer.
8. Archives page! Now, I know it looks quite plain, but I ended up hacking my WordPress a bit for wp_get_archives to show headings for the monthly archive and the alphabetical archive. So it may not look like much, but it’s much shinier now!

In line with the revamp, I’ve gone through all older posts and pages and removed a number of them: script-only updates, “website revamp!” posts without any other content, and scripts documentation. Script-y things will stay at my scripts archive, which will soon get a little sprucing-up; it seems things are b0rked at the moment.

Let me know if you see anything amiss (IE issues may still be skulking around, but feel free to let me know!), or have questions/comments/weird trivia on the revamp ;)