Of course, it could never last. But the fact that I almost made it through a whole year before changing my WordPress theme gives me some comfort.
Anyone reading this blog would scarcely have noticed in any case but, from where I’m sitting, the choice of theme has some pretty major implications for what I’m able to do with this site.
While I really enjoyed the experience of moving to a more up-to-date block-based theme in Blocksy, I inevitably found that I was spending too much time fiddling with pointless settings and no time at all actually publishing posts.
The statistics speak for themselves: between November 2023 and last month (when I finally pulled the plug on Blocky and returned to the “themiverse” of Swedish designer Anders Norén), I published a grand total of two posts!
By switching to a more basic theme, with limited options to make use of Gutenberg and the WordPress site editor, I’m hoping to be able to focus on content and concision, rather than procrastination and indecision.
But you’ve heard all of this before (assuming you were reading along the last time I went through all of this, in February 2023). Back then, I installed a five-year-old theme; this time around, I’ve opted for Anders Norén’s even older Hoffmann theme.
Hoffmann, which Norén describes as “a stylish and minimal WordPress theme for bloggers”, first came out in 2014: long before the WordPress site editor even arrived, and deep in the glorious days of the classic text editor.
While there are some features of the block editor that are really handy for me as a blogger who works predominantly in text, I really do think I am better off using a theme that is more straightforward and neat. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. Let’s see how it all works out.
The major downside of Hoffman is that it doesn’t have in-built portfolio support, but I’ll be looking for ways to work around that, for starters by de-linking the default portfolio landing page and creating a published works landing page instead.
But this is a really trivial drawback, given that my portfolio hasn’t even been updated in a number of years, and with no new works on the horizon, I don’t think I’ll be troubling the scorers on that account any time soon.
Instead, I’m gradually migrating my long-form content to Substack, while keeping this site as a clearing house for publishing news (of which, more soon!) and other ephemera.
