Switch

Okay I made a decision. Let’s go back to basics. After spending much time in trying all sorts of themes I switched to the default WordPress theme Kubrick by Michael Heilemann. The themes I have tried out so far:

• Emire from Phu Ly
• Glued-Ideas Subtle from Christopher Frazier
• Hemingway from Kyle Neath
• Regulus from Ben Gillbanks

To name just the ones I enjoyed quite a bit. Another theme that caught my attention for it’s nice layout and use of AJAX snippets is ‘Lush’ from Marco van Hylckama Vlieg and Christoph Boecken. I haven’t decided yet for it has some limitations on the way it’ll render on FireFox.

So why the change to Kubrick?

Well I was a bit bored. It clearly seems that the more a theme offers in colors, layout, useability the faster it bored me. Anyway that’s one explanation. Another might be that I am still charmed by the raw simplicity that Kubrick offers. It’s almost like this theme is the foundation of all blog-themes. And maybe it is. Offcourse I adjusted one thingy or two. To name a few modifications I have made:

• Added LiveSearch AJAX powered search, instead of the default/conventional search method, by John Nunemaker.
• Altered the rather dull <h2> font family by a more stylish one, Century Gothic. I like it’s typography more.
• Added a more efficient way to navigate my blog by use of Liew Cheon Fong’s ‘SuperNav-bar’.

The plugins I use

• Taragana’s Del.icio.us mp3 Player. Which you can see in action here.
• WP Lightbox 2 and Falbum mashup by Lokesh Dhakar and Elijah Cornell respectively and Adrian (a.k.a. GrinGod) responsible for the mashup.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis.
• Viper’s Video QuickTags by Viper007bond.
• The Excerpt Reloaded by Kaf Oseo
• WP-PageNavi by GaMerZ
• SEM Recent Comments and Recent Posts by Denis de Bernardy
• Anti Spam Image by Krazy Nio
• DD Formmailer by Aleister
• FlickrRSS by Dave Kellam
• Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith and Jennifer (ScriptyGoddess)
• Related Posts by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu
• AdSense DeLuxe by Acme Technologies
• Gravatars by Scott Merrill a.k.a. ‘Skippy’.
• InlineRSS by Cal Demaine. In action here.
• Exec-PHP by Sören Weber

And a few more I didn’t mention because it’s use isn’t visible on the blog but in the admin section.

Another nice feature I discovered was the Kubrick-Headermaker a.k.a. “Kubrickr” by Owen Winkler at RedAlt. You really should try it out. I realize that this might be old information but I was glad I found it. Result…look at the header image. Like it?

Conclusion

I am defnitely going to change again. I just love the work in getting a theme modded to my likings and making it XHTML Strict 1.0.

Wishes for Kubrick

I am still very interested in more AJAX control. This site is powered with the Script.aculo.us scripts. But other, maybe lighter/easier script suites are waiting like Moo.FX. And even maybe Ruby on Rails stuff. I have a lot todo. But to stick with Script.aculo.us seems difficult because of its bugs. In certain situations IE and FF crash because of Script.aculo.us. That’s a pitty.