Unbeknownst to you, o nobly born, the underpinnings of this website were removed today and replaced with a nearly identical infrastructure. Only a couple of minor issues – issue-lets, really – remain unresolved, but they will be dealt with and in any event should not keep you from experiencing the blog much as you have before. In other words, carry on!
(So ends this report for the majority of you, who are likely unconcerned about such matters. To the two or three of you who may actually want more details, please read on.)
As you will recall (and as a glance at the footer of this site will inform), the framework of this blog is provided by the Thesis Theme for WordPress, created by Chris Pearson. Thesis provides the structure; the blog’s appearance is my noirish adaptation of a port of an earlier Pearson theme, Neoclassical, to the Thesis platform by the group DIYninjas. Did I lose you in that bit of exposition? No? Excellent. Let’s move on.
The core philosophy behind Thesis is that one can make many changes to the theme – essentially creating countless blogs of varying appearance and function – without having to edit the core files of the theme. This is done by editing certain custom files dedicated to that purpose. With all personalizations confined to those files, one can upgrade Thesis as new editions are produced, without fear of overwriting those changes or having to laboriously re-edit core files.
An admission: My adaptation of the Neoclassical + Thesis post to my needs was not quite as clean as I would have liked. To be sure, working with Thesis and the NeoThesis port has actually been my least heavy-handed hack job to date, certainly owing more to the structure of Thesis than to my own skills. Still, I found myself having to edit a core Thesis file here or there because I couldn’t see a clear custom path. Even worse – and this really was crucial to me – I had initially worked in my typical rush to get-it-done; as a result, I wasn’t sure afterwards just where I’d done all of my core file editing. If I couldn’t remember that, I’d likely be unpleasantly surprised when the time came to upgrade Thesis.
To refresh my memory – and to actually reduce the instances of core file edits if possible – I redid the adaptation of the Neoclassical + Thesis port today, one step at a time. When done, I trashed the old Thesis arrangement and replaced it with the new. There are one or two things that I need to tweak, but on the whole this seems (to me) a better blog that it has been before the change.
Most importantly, I was able to cut the number of core Thesis file edits down to the loneliest number – one – and I actually remember what and where it is. I don’t think I know enough about Thesis to solve it on my own (just yet), but I now understand my own setup to ask an intelligent question of people who do know enough.
And thus endeth the geek-lite sermon for today. Now you may carry on. We’ll talk more about Thesis in general at another time.
