Variations On A Theme

There’s nothing geeky about ForeverGeek’s new theme. The site announced it was moving from Movable Type to Wordpress and promised a snazzy new theme to readers. The theme is way sexier than the old one and as Marco Jardim, one of the sites oldest editors said,

We might have lost a bit of the serious “geeky look” that the old design had, but instead we gained a more mainstream presentation without breaking the previous content or the readability. And I think that most of our readers will appreciate it.

The switch from MT to Wordpress comes on the heels of a recent post from Matt Mullenweg, creator and high leader of the Cult of Wordpress, where Matt mentioned the availabilty of over 1,000 Wordpress templates that are available for use or hacking. I’ve looked at about 938 of the templates trying to come up with something for BuzzDroid. We’ve only got 62 more to go and I’m sure we’ll find what we want sooner or later.

Matt’s post was actually very diplomatic and a bit of a WP easter egg. As WP figurehead, it wouldn’t be right for Matt to come out and say “I told you so”. But he can still link.

Matt points you to a post at Daring Fireball which is a fantastic blog powered by Movable Type, not Wordpress. The post at Daring Fireball is an excellent, almost defensive response by someone using Movable Type to a post titled “God I Hate Wordpress” on yet another blog which claimed to have force-like abilities to know whether or not a blog was powered by Wordpress or Movable Type simply by the appearance of a Wordpress blog, including elements like

Way too many links in the sidebar or header, usually styled the same way? Info all over the place? A candidly modified Kubrick theme? Referring to static pages as, omigod, Pages?

Not everyone is a designer. Don’t forget, blogging is supposed to be about content. Eye candy is nice sometimes and I agree, after looking at so many variations on a theme, the elements do get old.

Its nice to know that after I’ve spent way too many hours thinking about a theme, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber spent 6 weeks picking out the right shade of grey for his blog.

It took me six weeks to choose the exact shade of Daring Fireball’s background color, #4a525a.

By dumping Movable Type and switching to WP while simultaneously serving up a much more commercially viable and aesthically pleasing theme, ForeverGeek punctuates the coversation nicely. Congratulations on the switch and the theme looks great.