Yippee and hooray, deepsicks is new new! as friends of the site will notice.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The old design, applied painstakingly in 2008, was beginning to bore me. It was my first deep foray into WordPress and theme throttling; I’ve since retooled the site and created (i.,e., chopped to bits) 4 or 5 other WP sites. Experience and the skills gleaned made me eager to again re-imagine d6. The internet has also become so dare-I-say aggressively social. It is not about content but community. And community’s great, sure, but not when the impetus for creation is affirmation and the neverending feedback lookie loo loops of likes and links. The internet—art—life does not need aggregation. It needs content.

I wanted a theme that reflects that idea and is what it values. While deepsicks has always been textually focused, I wanted this highlighted even more—while also giving stronger credence to the photography that has been showing up more often (and as solo images, disconnected from substantial narrative) over the past few months. For all my interest in social media, as a webophile and librarian, I don’t care if you care if I’m on Facebook or in what clever way I condensed my latest thought to legal tweet. If you want to be here, then you should be here, context aware but not crushed by it.

After hours of searching, I found my dream-maybe in Wu Wei, a theme by Jeff Ngan. It’s touted as minimalist, following the Taoist concept of its namesake: Knowing when to act and when not to act. Irony-steeped, I shredded the theme considerably to make it less less and more my perceived needs. I think I did well with fulfilling my objectives: text and photos are more prominent, post tags are visible, it’s cleaner, it’s sharper and it’s undeniably deepsicks. I’m pleased.

The design is optimized for Firefox, and there may be broken links or oddball pages over the next few days as the site transitions. I will resize photos for the most recent posts plus a few favorites to take advantage of all the new space, but most posts will stay as is (and they’ll look wonky because of it, but eight years is a long time to dredge and sledge).

Naturally, future forward will have the site lookin’ sharp. Please email or comment if you find anything borked or unusual, or if you have other suggestions. Thanks for your patience!