My New Favicon: What Do You Think?

Hey everyone. Have you noticed my new favicon (the little picture to the left of my blog’s url address in your browser bar)? WordPress.com, the best free blogging service by far, now offers blog images, which double as favicons. You can upload your own image from the Settings menu (top left of the dashboard next below the Support tab).

My quandry is I really think I should redesign the header to match it. I designed this a long time back, before I really realized favicons weren’t possible for wordpress. So I can’t hunt down the cross image I used for this, to use in redesigning my header, so I may have to redesign everything.

I added a larger version of the favicon at the top of my sidebar (not quite as large as the one in this post). For now I’ll leave it like this. But I may get the designer in me going again.

So I thought I’d ask: What do you think of the current blog header? Or theme? Does it jive with the favicon? Should I change it? Are you happy with everything as is? (I know I tend to change things up around here too often….) I’m interested in your thoughts. Thanks.

A New Old Look

Is the sixth time the charm? I don’t know but this is the 6th blog theme I’ve had for my blog. I don’t know if anyone remembers the red and tan original Blogger blog. Then we had an olive 2.0, an orange 3.0, then a very brief blue and green 4.0, and recently we’ve been all blue. (See below for samples of these previous looks.)

I think I’ve finally hit on the absolute best theme, and it’s been under my nose all along! I picked this theme for my KJV Only Debate Resource Center blog, and so I’ve shied away from using it for my main blog. But when I noticed that my blogging pal John Chitty recently updated his theme, it got me thinking. I checked out the themes again, and with WordPress’ new theme previewer, I found it easy to sample my options.

When I tested my idea of resurrecting my first header image (from 2.0), I was hooked. That hall with the stone arches (from St. Johns College at Cambridge) has always epitomized a “Reformed” feel to me. And the hallway leads you deeper in (semper Reformanda). There are many of you who haven’t seen this picture, so I hope you’ll give your impressions of it.

All along I’ve been looking for something green (not olive!). And I’ve finally found it. It has numbered comments with links, to boot. Plus it handles pictures and quotes well — no small feat compared to other popular WordPress blog themes. So Misty Look (the name of the theme), it is.

It didn’t take too much work to tweak my sidebar a bit, and rearrange my pages. But I couldn’t be happier with almost everything about this theme. I probably won’t change my KJVO blog either, since it is so rarely visited (in comparison to Fundamentally Reformed) and since it really isn’t a normal blog where I post all the time. What makes this really crazy is the fact that I’ve been maintaining another blog (of sorts) for my grandfather, and for that one I used Misty Look, too! That blog is designed more like a web page, which promotes some paddles he is selling to earn money for a missions’ cause.

Anyways, this new old look appeals to me. What say ye? If I can ever edit the older posts to make the colors consistent, I’ll probably be happy for a long time. But I can’t say a new and perfect edition of this blog won’t ever appear. 7.0 would only come if WordPress.com gives us a fantastic new theme. We’ll see.

UPDATE: For posterity’s sake, I’ve included near screen shots of the 5 previous designs for this blog:

1.0

For this first one, it had a tan instead of gray background, and was a blogger-template hack. (Picture obtained from themes.wordpress.net)

2.0 3.0 4.0

5.0

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: I’ve decided to also include in this old post, the version 6 and 7 screenshots. The current version of the blog is also included as version 8. –4/24/2010

6.0 7.0 8.0