There’s a new look on the site now. I’ve installed the K2 theme for WordPress. My motive for doing this was two-fold. First, I will be migrating much of my content (homebrewing, electronics, etc., pages) from the hand-crafted static HTML pages into WordPress, basically using WordPress to manage the whole site. I want the new pages to appear as static pages, not as blog posts. And I wanted this static content to appear under a set of tabs at the top of the site, much like it does in the hand-crafted HTML pages. K2 makes this possible (so do many other themes…).

Second, I don’t want to give up Adsense when I do this. I needed a way to get the Adsense ad blocks to appear on the sidebar of the site. K2 has a feature I haven’t seen in any other WordPress theme: the ability to customize the sidebar with modular snap-in blocks. Including a generic HTML block, which provides an excellent place to paste the Adsense Javescript code.

(I’m not saying none of the other thousand WordPress themes can do this… just that K2 is the only theme I’ve found, having only checked a few, that can.)

I find the idea of K2 interesting… these modular, snap-in blocks remind me very strongly of PHP-Nuke (which I briefly experimented with, before deciding it couldn’t really do what I wanted.) But it’s interesting that blocks are at the very core of PHP-Nuke, but in the WordPress, they’ve only recently been added, at the very highest layer of the system (in a theme).

Anyway, WordPress with K2 is now getting astonishinly close to the web-site management tool I really wanted.

The only thing I don’t like about K2 in its default configuration is that it is a fixed-width theme. I don’t like fixed-width themes. When I maximize a browser window, I want to see more content.  Not the same amount of content with monstrous wide-ass borders around it. Apparently K2 used to support a variable-width option, but they got rid of it for some reason.

I found a page that describes a way to edit the stylesheet to make it variable-width again. I’m using that now, but it’s still not perfect: It does a 65%/25% split between content column and sidebar. That’s silly… I want the sidebar to be fixed width, and the content to be “all the rest”. I don’t have enough understanding yet of the CSS box model to make that happen. All my attempts have mangled the layout in some unpalatable way. But I’ll keep working on it.