Davidized!

Ever since I relaunched Davidized something has been nagging at me; I didn’t feel like the site felt very personal, and I definitely didn’t feel like it represented me at all. It took me a while to figure out what to do about that, but I finally figured it out. Davidized needed a face-lift.

I realize that I redesign the site on a pretty regular basis, but typically I start from a design that already exists and just modify it to work as a WordPress theme. I thought about doing that this time and I went through a whole bunch of themes and designs and couldn’t find one that really felt like it represented me very well at all, so I decided to design my own theme from scratch. It’s been a while since I’ve done very much design work so it took me a while to get things up and running but I’m pretty happy with the way things have turned out.

In an effort to make a theme that I thought could better represent me I decided to create a theme that’s designed to change over time. I’ve had the idea for quite a while, but never got around to actually implementing it until now. Depending on the time of day you’re reading this (assuming you’re reading this on my site and not through a feed reader) the image in the header may be a nice sunny day or a dark night with the moon in the sky. These images are just the beginning of my plans, eventually I’m planning on having the header change for special occasions, much like Google does with their Doodles, or even for the weather where I’m at. The background and text color also changes between day and night, because I prefer looking at sites with darker backgrounds at night.

I also decided to go with a different style of front page this time. Instead of just showing the last 10 or so posts in full or with big chunks of them, I decided to try just showing titles and the excerpt for the most recent post, and also incorporate my lifestream on the side of the page. I thought this might be a better way to go because I’m notoriously bad about updating my blog, but I’m always doing other things on other sites so at least my lifestream could stay up to date for site visitors.

Finally a note about the day/night styles, currently the stylesheet that changes everything from day mode to night mode is changed when the theme is processed so there is no way to change it if you’d prefer the site be in day or night mode all the time. I’m working on making that possible, but I had some technical difficulty with the javascript I used to use for changing the styles of the page.

I hope you like the new look, I’ve been working on some other changes around the site too (and am still working) so feel free to poke around and see what’s new. If you’d like to get in touch, feel free to comment below or contact me directly.