I updated this blog to a new theme yesterday. This is something I had been dragging my feet on for a while and I finally bit the bullet and did it.
I was previously using a theme called Atahualpa which hasn’t been updated since 2018. That was fine, coz I barely tweaked the theme, but things were slowly falling apart. The site looked quite dated, the theme didn’t have a mobile friendly view, and after a recent PHP update I couldn’t even access the theme options any more. Crazy!
I started searching for a new theme but it was a tiring effort. For one most of the themes seem to be for websites now rather than just a simple blog. There’s all sort of fancy stuff like post thumbnails and WooCommerce and all that, while all I wanted was a simple theme that I could tweak a bit with minimal effort so I can get on with the business of blogging. I briefly thought of trying out a static generator like Hugo or Gatsby (most of the blogs based on these look so beautiful) but quickly gave up as that seemed to be another learning curve. I mean sure, the geek in me would love to go down the rabbit hole of setting these up, but I have to also reign myself in because time is limited and there’s other things I’d like to do… I’d rather use my blog as a tool than spend time working on it. That’s just my preference at least currently and one of the reason why I switched to using a shared hosting than a VPS as I used to in the host.
Anyways, the closest theme that I liked was WordPress’s Twenty Fifteen theme. Then I stumbled upon a child theme called Parole 2015 (notice the theme here, they are all for 2015 which seems to be the time period from which I like blog themes). Both these are mobile friendly, and Parole 2015 let me add a dash of colour as it had some good default colour schemes; then I added some Google Fonts to make things pretty and that’s where we are at now. New theme, yay!
I made a child theme of Parole 2015 so I can fiddle around with it. Should put it on GitHub or similar if it helps anyone else.