I recently finished a 2000+ word post (I’m not going to reveal what it’s about for now), and was adding pictures to it to post it up on this blog when I realised it just wouldn’t do. That post was unreadable with this current blog theme.
You see, the problem is that I prefer to have pictures aligned right next to the content of my post instead of above it (as can be seen in this post). When I align it as such, what happens is that the text itself gets squeezed so that it only covers half of what it would originally cover. This makes for very difficult reading because 1) my sidebar is so wide and 2) this theme has a fixed width and it’s pretty narrow in general as compared to other themes. Furthermore, with 2000 words, I like to sprinkle images throughout the article so that it doesn’t get too boring. However, when I do it to this article with this theme, it becomes too much of an eyesore. Paragraphs are so crammed together that it makes it extremely difficult to read and the images become more of a hindrance than anything else.
Hence, reading a 2000+ word article in such a narrow space will make anyone’s eyes bleed (as I discovered when I previewed the post). Thus, I am now in search of a new theme that 1) has a fluid width (ie. it adjusts according to the resolution of the reader’s monitor at that time) and 2) has a narrower sidebar, so that the content will take up a considerable portion of the screen for users with traditional 1024 by 768 screens.
Surprisingly, it’s actually quite hard to find such a theme. Fixed width themes seem much more popular (probably because they’re a lot easier to code) and for some reason, people seem to adore wide sidebars. Why in the world do bloggers like sidebars that take up so much space till the point where it makes it harder for the reader to actually read the content.
Thus my search begins, I’ll be playing around with a few themes on this blog to see how they look.
As I stated in the earlier post, Blogger used to be my platform of choice a few years back thanks to its infinite level of customisation, for it allowed users to edit the raw HTML code however they liked. It’s a feature that WordPress.com didn’t, and still doesn’t, have. However, over time I began to realise how ridiculous my blog skins were getting, and decided to switch over to WordPress. While it didn’t offer as much customisation options as blogger, it was still a really simple and effective platform, and I’ve come to love it over the years.
For years before wordpress became so popular (ie. before wordpress.COM), most of the people I knew had one favourite blogging platform: Blogger (or blogspot as it was known then). There was much to love about blogger, chief among them being the ability to add your own piece of code and edit it however you like (unlike in wordpress.com). With that ability, people started coding the equivalent of wordpress plugins, which were really just chunks of code that you downloaded in a .txt file and copied into the correct portion of your blog site.