Another fresh start

I have decided to refresh my approach to blogging (yet again). There are a couple of main drivers for this.

Rationalised focus

Firstly, my new job brings some natural restrictions around what I can write about. This resolves one of the main issues I have always faced with blogging — the eclectic nature of the topics I wrote about. I was always scared of alienating a certain section of readers by writing about this and that.

Now I am able to rationalise the blog to focus on a handful of key topics. My work in user experience and information architecture is the main thing I want to write and share about. Some personal posts, particularly about travel, have been among the most popular over the years, so those will stay as well.

Going back to WordPress classic editor

The other main motivation for changing was that my experiment with using the Gutenberg editor in WordPress ended up deeply frustrating me.

Like learning WordPress the first time back in 2004, I faced a steep learning curve to understand some basics about how it worked. It took much longer than I thought it should have done for something that is meant to be an intuitive interface.

It did eventually click somewhat, and I got about 80% happy with it. I expected the other 20% to come. But I found myself hitting a brick wall where changes that were important and fundamental to me seemed utterly impossible.

Also, I am not on board with the heavy div soup code generated by the Gutenberg editor, when almost all the content I publish could be a simple Markdown input converted to lightweight standard HTML.

I have ended up sticking with WordPress, but reverting back to the classic interface and developing my own theme.

Developing the new theme

I feared having to dive into WordPress theme development again. I didn’t want to go back to my old theme because the code was a complete mess, with a monstrous CSS file that probably genuinely had lines that I originally wrote 20 years ago.

With a bit of Googling, I discovered the foundation of my new approach.

A WordPress theme called Bare Minimum by David Greenwald describes itself as: “Just the minimum code to get a theme off the ground.”

Impressively lightweight, it requires just an index.php file, functions.php. I have been able to easily adapt these files to my requirements, and I have added a comments.php file to enable comments.

For CSS, I have adapted and built on concrete.css: “A simple and to the point classless CSS stylesheet”.

I have now added some classes and tweaked it a fair bit to work how I want it to. But once again I was impressed with how well it worked out of the box, as a simple way of displaying a simple HTML document: exactly what I was looking for.

Also, it has prefers-color-scheme built in, unlike with Gutenberg where it seemed unnecessarily difficult to implement. This means that light mode is back by popular demand, based on your system settings.

More development will come, but already I am happier with the results than I was after several months of battling with Gutenberg.

I used Studio by WordPress.com as my development environment, after reading about it on Gareth Saunders’ blog. I have to say, this was even easier than my wildest dreams, never mind my expectations. This has been a great improvement over struggling with Xampp back in the day.