whoooops, guess I was one of the ones whose theme got blown away when a bunch of people got booted into in password reset jail... oh well, it was due for a revamp anyway
and as much as I enjoy tinkering with my blog layout, I have never felt the need to actively shill for whichever theme I was butchering in the “Edit HTML” window at any particular time...
...but I do kind of want to give a shoutout to @april ‘s Vision theme for being
1. a de-crufted version of everything that’s good about the default Optica theme and the Tumblr dashboard view in general, with just enough sensible additions (sidebar, visible post dates, etc) to make it humane 2. much semantic, very HTML5, wow, this shit is readable as hell and doesn’t do anything with thickets of nested <div>s that can’t be accomplished with <section>s and <article>s and <aside>s 3. flexible and customizable in the EXACT ways needed to make it, incredibly, the only theme I haven’t had to butcher in “Edit HTML” at all to make it do what I want. and ONLY in those ways. no gazillion fiddly configs.
photosets still followed by a huge empty space in Firefox because of an issue scaling them down to fit the post width? or just want to give them more room on screens that’ll fit them? post width is a CSS variable! you can override it with custom styling in the advanced options!
wanna insert an analytics script, or offload some informational links out of the blog description but keep them on every page? there is one (1) designated widget space in the sidebar where you can enter any HTML you want.
you do not have to learn a Widget System. you do not have to curse and wonder what kind of Martian would need the option to put the searchbar in the page footer. you just slap some basic HTML down and piggyback off the existing styles and CSS variables to make it look like it belongs there. I made a featured-tag cloud with just a <h1>, a <nav>, a bunch of bare links, and no wrappers whatsoever. it’s EXACTLY what it needs to be and no more.
can’t promise I won’t eventually end up fucking with the theme HTML itself, because I like to fuck with things and I want timestamps next to my post dates, dammit, but the whole experience of setting this thing up was pretty remarkable.
