Thoughts

It’s nearly about a year ago since I have installed Arun’s The Morning After theme (version 1.2) on my weblog. Actually, it was the 01st of November 2007 when I found this beautiful theme with the most active and helpful community.

And nearly one year of constant customization and nine WordPress upgrades later, I feel like having arrived.

Having arrived?

Let’s have a look at my web history (screen shots are made on my test server, so don’t wonder about the titles and dates) to explain what I mean:.

Version 0.1

I went online 1998 with nickbohle.de. A really simple (static) site that I have created with MS Frontpage. Black background, blue text, four pages and one CGI element. Pretty basic…

Version 1.0

After creating the website in 1998, I nearly forgot about it… But the purchase of Macromedia Dreamweaver and the fact of going abroad to Vaasa/Finland made me design a new version of nickbohle.de in 2002. The design was inspired by the Finnish flag. Based on a lot of frames, the whole site was still static. But actually, it was the beginning of nickbohle.de being a weblog. Considering this, my first blog post was on the 2nd of September 2002 about my arrival to Vaasa. My site became my diary of my time abroad, so actually, I was blogging without knowing what a weblog is.

Version 1.1

Between 2005 and 2006, my site became „dynamic“. I created three static pages based on CSS and added a weblog run by Textpattern. The colors of the site were white, grey and naval blue…

Version 1.2

In the last quarter of 2006, I swichted from Textpattern to WordPress (Version 2.2). One of my best decisions concerning nickbohle.de. This time, the whole site was (and still is) dynamic based on PHP, MySQl and CSS. I deinstalled Dreamweaver started to code with a simple text editor. Customizing the theme „coffespot“ was a great learning experience… About CSS, PHP and WordPress…

Version 1.3

When I had learned everything about Coffeespot, I decided to switch to a new theme. The result was web 2.0 Green. A great theme that could be easily adopted to my color preferences. Besides my colours, I have added support for tags.

The Morning After

But as mentioned above, I stumbled over The Morning After. From sandbox to magazin-style was a big step in a more professional web presence. The colors of white, grey and #000066 (I guess this chould be called naval blue) persisted. I have customized The Morning quite a lot, some of my changes already went into core (somehow), and I expect some of my changes being part of The Morning After 1.4:

• When I started with TMA, it did not support tags. I added them.
• Related posts were missing, too.
• I have highlighted my comments.
• Added my twitter status updates (Statusmeldungen) to the starting page.
• Made TMA ready for the in-built galleries of WordPress.
• Personalized the comments with Gravatars.
• Made it possible to have a sitelogo and a title.
• Added a navigation bar.
• Seperated trackbacks/pingbacks from the normal comments.
• Added web badges of some of my web profiles to the starting page.
• A lot of other minor changes…

Having said that I feel arrived includes that I do not need or want so much changes. My thoughts (ohh.. reference to the title of the post) about the future of TMA and nickbohle.de are:

• Keeping up with development of WordPress and add new features (e.g. threaded comments) to my weblog.
• Making the div classes of captionfull, captionleft and captionright compatible with the css definitons of WordPress… Minor alignments problems.
• Adding Localization.. I want a theme in English and in German… but the plug-ins for multi-language blogs are too bad…

Anyway, the future of nickbohle.de is with The Morning After…. What do you expect of the future? Any suggestions for me?