James Wilding's Weblog

While my real house languishes without hot water, I’ve lit the log fire and done some work on my blog!

I’ve been wanting for a while to get Derek Powazek’s Depo-Skinny theme (which I love, and have modified quite a bit) to show excerpts instead of full posts on the home page. This was inspired by John Nunemaker’s railstips.org, which does a nice job of showing an overview of posts on the home page.

I’ve always thought that full posts on my home page is too much, because I tend to write a lot (long, boring, geeky stuff mainly — that’s boring unless you’re a Ruby or Rails developer!). Up to now, I’ve been avoiding digging into Depo-Skinny’s PHP code because, well, I don’t like PHP :)

This morning though I jumped in and spent some time writing excerpts for recent blog posts, and fixing the theme to show them on the home page (I used WordPress’s the_excerpt()). I think this is a big improvement: you can scan the home page and easily see what I’ve been writing about recently.

I’ve also replaced the old header photo with a Wordle, which is another idea I’ve stolen from elsewhere :) This time, it’s from wordpressfoundation.org which, by the way, uses a new theme called “2010″. Looks nice.

So, a little bit of redesign work and I’m much happier! Check out my home page — what do you think?