I’ve been preparing ELS Blogs to be flattened and archived, and I’m working on another, longer post that both reflects on and documents the process. Part of that post became unruly, so I figured I would break it out here. I started to go down the rabbit hole of themes from 2007 that didn’t break 16 years later. You see, probably the biggest issue archiving a blog platform like ELS Blogs or UMW Blogs is broken themes that make flattening any content either ugly or impossible. Probably more than half the 68 sites in ELS Blogs were inaccessible due to broken themes. I spent time this morning going through and fixing each and every one so they resolve cleanly before being archived.
But rather than just focusing on what was broken, I wanted to highlight the themes that didn’t break, so I figured it might be fun to provide a little showcase of early WordPress themes that still work fairly well. So, here it goes:
The “All I Could Say Was…” blog is donning a very time appropriate “Thoughts” theme (Version: 2.0) designed by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, with the tagline: “a muted blueness.”
The “Dry Your Eyes” blog is sporting a personal favorite, the “Connections Reloaded” theme (ver. 1.5) designed by Ajay D’Souza, the tagline for this theme is “going places in some style.”
“Ellie’s FTC Blog” is floating another theme by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, this one is Waterlily (ver. 2.5) with the tagline “messing about on the river.”
“A Tropical Iceland” is using Framefake (ver. 1.0) by Kai Ackermann, who is “getting framey with it.”
The “And why not? It worked in Blazing Saddles!” blog chose Jakarta (ver. 1.1) by Jose Mulia, where “sandstone meets accessibility” is this theme’s claim to fame:
The GlossyBlue theme (ver 1.2) by Nick is the choice of HumanisticMystic’s “New Media Studies” blog because “it’s glossy, it’s blue… need you know any more?”
The “I’m Always Home. I’m Uncool” blog went with RoundFlow (ver. 1.0)
by The undersigned because you can “set every colour just how you like it:”
The Crop Circles theme (ver. 1.5) by Marianne has by favorite tagline: “a theme invaded by aliens.” That has got to be why the “George Street” blog chose this one.
Finally, there is Regulus (ver, 2.2) by Ben Gillbanks the theme that delivers “highly customisable headers and more.” Custom headers were a big deal in 2007, as the “Byronolog” will attest to!
I know Olia Lialina termed the early website designs Prof. Dr. style, what to we call the designs of this era? I got many of these themes from a theme pack James Farmer assembled for folks creating WPMu instances like ELS Blogs or UMW Blogs, and there was a huge attraction to being able to provide both choice and customization for your site, and looking at the above sites I am remembering why 🙂
