Smigle Lite Release

This site has been running for a while now, and I’ve been using the theme I created a while back which is a fork of Smigle. I really liked smigle, however it was just not exactly what I wanted. I loved that it was stripped back and looked like it was stright out of the 90’s however it had some things missing and some features I didn’t want. So I forked it and then started making changes that I wanted. The latest version of my forked theme can be found on GitHub

Features Removed

So there really wasn’t much to remove they were just some small things. For example I didn’t want in the post meta data the read time and number of words. I felt that this wasn’t needed because who really cares how long it takes to read something only the author. I though with that being around that would fuel my anexity and force me to write longer and longer posts which is not the point of this blog it basically only going to be me reading it anyways. Second was the subtitle of the site, I’m not cool enough to have a tag line or catchphase so that was deleted, then alongside that was the profile picture. I felt that a profile picture didn’t really go with the look and feel that I was going for with the changes to the theme. Finally was a restructure of the tags/categories pages, each of the items as in some sort of bubble which I didn’t really like, so to keep inline with the 90s feel I decided to go with a flat list.

Features Added

So first was modification of the footer of the theme, to show that this was a fork of smigle, because that’s the right thing to do. Second was the allowing of the customisation of the content licence as this was hard coded. Now this can either be hidden or a licence type with link provided. Then withing posts there is now the option to navigate to the next and previous post in the series this is just something that I like to see on text based sites where I can just keep reading without having to remember where I was in the post list. Finally there is a configurable section at the bottom of each post that shows the latest n posts that have been published. This can either be turned off or display n number of posts, I’ve got mine configured to three latest posts. The nice touch with this is that if the post you’re reading should be in that list then it’s not included the next older one is included, as there’s no point to including the post your already reading.