I made the decision to abandon Chris Prillio’s WordPress theme for a theme that better suites my content’s theme. Let me introduce the new theme, Hybird.
The Old WiketPixie Theme
I loved WiketPixie but the problem with it was that it had bad SEO and it just looked plain silly on a tech-blog with that Wood background. The greatest thing about WiketPixie was that it had a RSS feed fetcher. You could add any of your social networking feeds like Tiwtter, Facebook or Plurk. Then whenever there was an update, it would display the latest item. That was pretty neat but there was a problem with it. It was not included onto the page via Javascript so the latest item would always get caught up in Google. Another problem with WiketPixie was the that black bar at the top. It was scary. The theme designer had planned to put a Share and Bookmark option for the toolbar, but he only made Share, I believe. The Share option on the bar would appear when you click on it. Of course, there is a problem with this too. Google would generally read the text for the names of the services you could share too. This could have been easily avoided if the designer had used Javascript.
Hybird is excellent though. Well, at least it’s better.
The new Hybird Theme
The first thing I notice is that the color actually fits. I’m not sure if Programming has a color, but I can tell you the texture isn’t wood. The next deal is that it actually works in multiple browsers. It’s decent in IE7, Opera 9.6, Safari and Chrome, and of course Firefox 3. It’s wonderful to have a consistent look and feel across browsers. The next major thing for me was threaded comments. I needed a theme that would be able to cope with threaded comments out of the box. The old theme would have need code editing and I hardly understand WordPress Themes.
I’m just getting used to Hybird, but I’m already loving it. So, thank you, everyone who has worked on Hybird. You’ve made my blog just that much better (in my opinion).
I’ll probably have more comments about the new theme soon.