For my readers in RSS-land, I’ve made some updates to the presentation here at Take the First Step.

Back to Landscape

I’ve returned to the default theme, landscape. I left because it took 27 minutes to generate the site. A little investigation led to the recent_posts widget as the guilty party – it was sorting the complete list of articles for every page. I removed the widget and generation time is under a minute.

This has also allowed me to change the format of my archive, category and tag pages from full text with pagination to date and title with no pagination. I think that it’s a lot easier skim over when you aren’t limited to 10 full text posts per page.

Theme Customization

I’ve made some changes to the underlying theme. The widgets now use theme properties to hide article counts and to change the archive list from monthly to annually. I also updated the CSS to use horizontal lists when displaying a bottom-bar rather than a sidebar.

I’m currently displaying the archive widget with annual links at the bottom of each page.

Theme in Github

Finally, I’m maintaining my theme in Github. This should make it easier for me to keep my theme up to date and allow me to make a pull request when I’m happy with my changes.