Hey Now, Hey Now, Don’t Theme It’s Over
Since the start of moving the blog from one service to another, it made use of the terrific Beaumont theme by Anders Norén. You’ll notice that as of this post, it’s currently not doing so. It could do so again, but I’ve been theme restless.
Mostly this happens when I’ve reached a certain degree or equilibrium on some other part of what I’ve been doing with this blog. In this case, bringing the population of posts up to parity with what had been here before the move.
The theme that had caught my eye was the very minimalist Hey by Automattic itself, except that its default font sizes are borderline unreadable on any device.
Beaumont was my first foray into understanding WordPress’ new “block theme” and “full site editing” regime, and having come to terms with all of that, I did want to try to suss out how to make Hey work for me.
In the end, the answer came in the form of reading up a bit on theme.json and finding the handy Create Block Theme plugin by WordPress, which automates the starting end of making a child theme. All it took was going into typography in theme.json, finding the fontSizes, and doing the math necessary to bump each font size up by 30%.
There might be some more tweaking here and there, and I dramatically simplified Hey’s default Front Page, Archive, and Index layouts. Missing as of this post is the “on this day” feature I’d had running on the front but that’s mostly because there aren’t any posts from previous incarnations of June 10 so I wouldn’t have been able to see how it was looking.
At any given moment, things might switch back to Beaumont. It’s entirely possible that I might switch back and forth for awhile to see what feels better to me.
If you’ve been around long enough, you know that I re-themed the blog in February and again in March, and there’s probably one more in there I’m forgetting. It’s not for nothing that two months ago I compared my blog theme to Ramona Flowers’ hair.
Addenda
- I’d be remiss if I didn’t come back and mention that my new avatar, which I’ve included here as well as any other accounts I have around the web, comes from this family photo taken in 1970 when I would have been just barely over a year old. In retrospect, I appreciate that even then, decades prior to my autism diagnosis, I avoided eye contact.