inqk.net

My blog has a new theme.

It’s time to ditch Hemingway. The theme has served me well and it was hard to let it go after all the work I’d put in to adjusting it but I need to move on.

Hemingway’s been a good example to me of the power of design. While this is ostensibly my blog and I can do whatever I want with it, I’m startled by how eventually blogging became all but impossible over the past few months. Undoubtedly a lot of that had to do with my schedule: I moved back to Australia, began work at a law firm and helped to organise an anime convention. But that doesn’t explain it all. Some — I’m not sure how much — was the result of this blog’s previous design.

The structure of the Hemingway design with the way it ‘featured’ posts on the front page always made me feel whatever I wrote had to achieve a certain level of significance to justify that placement. Anything short, pithy, or just not that memorable was better off being put somewhere else.

At first I thought this was good. It would prevent me from writing frivolous posts (and it gave me something to put on Twitter). What I discovered, however, was that it prevented me from writing anything. The great thing about blogging is the liberating nature of it when compared with other forms of writing. The theme actively worked against that; pushing me to write pieces that were of an epic enough nature to deserve to be there on the front page.

We’ll see how things work out with Old Popular Yolk.