After the dust settled I looked around at what I wanted to do next. I still held my day job, which continues to be my career and main focus. However, I seem to be driven to do something else outside of normal working hours. I guess my hobby is business. I love the challenge of trying to create something new. At the time I had an unusual interest, traditional wet shaving, which was something I found while looking for a pain-free shave. It’s a story for another time, but I had been selling a few razor blades through the wet shaving forums for a bit, but never really spending any time on it, nor making much money for that matter. I did it because I enjoyed the community and wanted to offer a service not available elsewhere. I started working on a number of other projects, internet related, but there was a nagging feeling that we had something with the blades. Late 2008 my wife and I decided to make a go with it and turned WestCoastShaving.com into a full fledge men’s grooming store. The store has come a long way in about a year, with high-performance shaving and grooming products for any budget. If this all seems strange to you, trust me, it turns a chore into a morning pleasure, saves you money, and is better for your face and the earth. Email or call with questions.

The problem with the site was that each blogger had their own subdomain and none of the content from other authors was accessible from any given blog.  Good thinking on our part, there.  Anyhow, a few months ago we were trying to decide what to do with the site and after some discussion John and I decided to try relaunching with a new look and feel with the same authors… all in the same blog.  The net result is pretty cool.

If you’re interested at all in photography, I’d suggest taking a second and visiting our site, Digital Photography Blogs, and saying hi.  Our writers would love your feedback and encouragement, and you just might learn something.  See you there!

• Download the latest version of Subtle for WordPress

Now that the testing is done, I’m having fun playing with this new beast. WP 2.5 is just so different that it’s going to take a little while to work out how I feel about it. The Web-2.0-ish look and feel are fine, however I’m beginning to feel done with the pale colors and 1px-gray-outlines-around-everything that this look entails.

I do like the fact that so much of the UI has been redesigned to be more obvious. Having trained quite a few clients in how to use WP, the UI changes are all welcome. Also, having related tasks available on the Edit / Write Post page is really smart. That’s usability!

The Add Media options are fantastic. I have a couple of clients doing video and audio podcasts and the addition of these links will be a welcome change from the current method of copying and pasting HTML I’ve given them. I’m having trouble with WP finding my old uploaded media, but I imagine that’s just an artifact of upgrading too many times and links getting lost.

I’d be interested in hearing what other people think about this new release. What do you love? What do you hate? Does this release get you interested in blogging again?

Here’s what’s different:

• Single posts now display tags
• A number of bugs in the linking to author pages have been fixed
• Fixed a bug in the TITLE of the page that added an extra dash

A quick note: if you change the name of the theme folder (usually “gluedideas_subtle”) make sure that you don’t add any spaces. If you add a space your header will not display correctly in Firefox. I’m looking into some error checking for this for the next release.

As always, feel free to post your comments and bugs here on the blog.

My point in mentioning asides is that they’re basically the WordPress Loop (the code in a theme that displays a list of posts) made into a widget. Since I’ve been working on building themes again (see Real Fusion), I’ve been thinking a lot about modularity of theme components and ways to make managing content on a site easier for the site owner and this of course lead me to think about The Loop and widgets, which then lead me to wonder how hard it would be to build an entire theme using widgets. Is it possible? Would it be useful? I’ve played with some test code and it’s definitely possible. I took my modularized Loop code from the Real Fusion site and started playing with options to make it work as a widget. It looks like it works great.

The real question is, “Why would anyone want to do this?” In the end, people use WordPress because it’s simple and not a full-blown CMS like Drupal that requires managing every block of content on the site. Themes are super simple ways to add some style to your site while not having to sweat the details of site design. Would anyone actually be interested in being able to create new loops, stack them on a page in any order or structure using the drag-and-drop widget admin, change them without having to mess with code (ex. list a single category of posts, and then change the category on the fly), etc.? I don’t know. What do you think?

John: Dude, the site has a PR7! What the heck?
Chris: Really? No way. Wow… it does. Too bad it got hacked. I had to pull the thing down.
John: You’ve GOT to get something up there.
Chris: Ya… you’re probably right.

So a couple of weeks later – and more prodding from John – not only is the site up again, but I’m releasing Subtle for WordPress 0.4 which now works with WordPress 2.3+. That’s right, I’ve finally caved and rewritten the widget code to conform to the wonky but ubiquitous widgets platform, which ended up making relaunching the site way easier. Go figure.

In addition to the widgets update, I’ve also cleaned up the archives / search results headers so that they let you know what you’re looking at when browsing through categories or date-based archives. Obvious? Yep. Should have put that in there years ago.

So if you’re still using Subtle for WordPress or are interested in trying it out again, now’s the time to grab a copy and start playing with it. Remember, Subtle has some cool features like Theme Styles and author pages – all features you won’t see in any other themes for WordPress right now. If you find bugs, feel free to e-mail me or post comments on the blog.

EDIT (08/02/20 9:23AM): I’ve updated the footer chicklet that links to Glued Ideas Blog to link directly to the page here. Additionally, I’ve added the Glued theme style to base install and made it the default theme style. Default and Subvert are still part of the package, but they were feeling a little dated. Then again, so is Glued. Maybe it’s time for a new theme.

I haven’t spent a lot of time testing this to make sure it works across all browsers, but I think it should be fine. Feel free to post issues you have in the forums and I’ll try to check in to get fixes into the tracker.

• Glued Theme Style

• Download the plugin now!