While I recently finished up my first K2 style modification (and I’m not too disappointed with it), I believe that not only can I do better, but K2 feels a little “bloated” with a bunch of extra “features” that I don’t use. In addition, I’ve slowly been accumulating more and more plugins to provide other “features.” Seeing as how my very first web pages were hacked together in notepad, I appreciate clean, well structured HTML code that is easily readable and debuggable. The code produced by K2 (at least with the various mods that I have installed) is far from pretty.

Given these considerations, I have decided to embark on a new endeavor – the creation of a new theme from the ground up (or almost the ground up) that will have my own personal flair, provide an appealing presentation of my material (whether it be text, photos, or other media), and still look nice under the hood. As I construct this theme, I will be going through my plugin list and removing the unnecessary ones and hard coding the features provided by a few static plugins into the template itself. Sure, this will result in less flexibility if I were to redistribute my theme, but I am currently intending this to be “for personal use only.” If I later decide to distribute the theme, I will strip it down to the necessities and release it for others to customize to their own tastes.

While blogs and blogging platforms present a powerful medium for everyone to publish their thoughts on the web, the additional overhead of a “heavy” setup simply seems excessive. I do have an ample bandwidth limit on this site (one that I never even come close to), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a visitor also has huge amounts of bandwidth, or, more importantly, time. Please bear with me as I prepare this upgrade to digivation.net. Along with the theme upgrade, I hope to fix the long-awaited photo gallery feature and clean up a few other areas of the site.