Well, it’s been a busy week-end for some of us, and yes my friend, that includes me. There were some important changes on this blog, some of them quite visible, some of them just starting to bloom. But the bottom line is that we are moving in the right direction.
First of all, as you may already noticed, there is a new layout for eDragonu.ro. I felt that it was the moment to make the step toward a professional implementation of a wordpress template. After searching the net several days, I finally decided to stay with thesis, a highly customizable, yet surprisingly stable wordpress theme. Installing it was a little bit time consuming, but in the end it really paid the time. I am satisfied with the new look, and, as I already told you, you are only seeing the top of the iceberg. There are more subtle options that I really like at this theme, and I plan to write a more detailed description of them in a couple of days. Oh, and when I said “professional”, I said also “commercial”, thesis is a paid theme and it is on the highest scale amongst the paid template systems.
OK, so now you wonder why I paid for a wordpress theme. The answer is really simple: because I want to focus on writing, not on customizing my blog theme every week. And because with this one I have more than a theme, I really have like a small publishing system. For instance, the picture you see on the right of the page, well, that multimedia box is a highly customizable content placeholder. I can assign to it a fixed image, a video box or custom code (like advertising, of course), and I can do that globally, for each post, or for each page. I already assigned to the pages top posts and downloads special images, just do a quick click to test. And I can do all of this from within wordpress dashboard, without digging through code, how about that?
The fact that I do know programming and server administration significantly more than the average web blogger (for those of you who don’t know, I’ve been in this business for the last 10 years, until I successfully sold my business a couple of months ago), well, that web savvy approach doesn’t mean that I should build my own theme. Just because I know how to do it it, doesn’t necessarily means I also have to do it. That knowledge and experience is surely a huge advantage and I also plan to use this with thesis. But patience is a virtue, and, as they say: all good things comes to those who wait – I will write an in-depth article about how to customize thesis. If you wanna know more about this theme before making digging into your pockets, there is a thesis showcase gallery page, which I recommend you to visit.
Another interesting thing is that eDragonu was featured this week in alltop.com. If you don’t know what is it, well, it seems that you haven’t been online too often lately, haven’t you? From their website description:
“alltop.com is an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. Tell us what you’re interested in, and we’ll bring you stories from the best websites and blogs on the topic. All the topics, all the time.”.
It’s an interesting project linking together feeds from various sources, with human supervision and with quite of personal involvement  from Guy Kawasaki, author of several books, with The Art Of Start being one of the most famous. So, my feed is there on life.alltop.com, a place which I also invite you to visit, because there are other extremely interesting blogs you can find there.
Oh, and if you wonder what “more” from the title of this blog post means, well, it means exactly that: all the pictures you see on the multimedia box (the image box of this theme, on the top right corner) are made with an iPhone, by yours truly :-).
Don’t know how your previous theme looked, but this one looks just fine, no worries..
@Patrick: thanks for reading, man 🙂 I somehow guessed that you do like this theme also 😉
@Rin Tin Tin: simplicity, readability, admin flexibility and control, those are the arguments for changing the last theme. I liked that too, man, but it was time for a change. And yes, I’m still in .ro until mid december 🙂
Dude, I liked more your previous theme. It was more.. organized, layout-wise. Design-wise I like this one more (yes, it comes a moment in life when you begin to value simplicity 😛 ). Anyway, change is always good. But, for example, you should try the “More” button in the WordPress posting interface. In my humble personal opinion it’s essential not to show “ditamai carnatul” as a post. But I repeat, that’s only my opinion.
Keep up the good work! U in .ro, btw?
I just came across your site and thought I’d drop you a note to congratulate you. Of course, what to congratulate you for is the hard part – the successful sale of your business, exciting move to New Zealand, or the feature on Alltop. All of that is very exciting. Congratulations.
And, of course, I like your new theme. 😉