No more changing of themes!
It can be tempting to change themes especially when you're starting out. But with what I've been doing lately is counter-productive in my writing sessions.
I'd stumble on the Themes page and see a theme (either from the built-ins or other bear bloggers) that is quite interesting to preview. I click preview, and huh, that looks nice. I click apply. Just like that, a whole new set of CSS is now applied. Most of the time, the site looks broken, then I spend a long time fixing it.
My early mistakes were not having a back up file for my current Themes page. Now I have collected a number of CSS files on my laptop. With so many choices to configure the blog with.
Time spent in configuring how the blog looks is time spent not writing. And I really want to spend more time editing my drafts, like a seed planted, watered and cared for. What I'm doing now is like being focused on how big or how small my digital garden should be, with seeds already planted but neglected.
So... in resolution to this dilemma of mine.
I'm going to stick to 'Delightful' as the main theme. And make it public that if I change the main theme of this page, I'm going to give half of my emergency fund to my fiancΓ© in support of building her own fund sooner. Now I don't want to give that away that easily with the press of a button.
There are a few features that I'm going to add that doesn't count as changing the theme entirely. They are:
- adding a toggle for light and dark theme
- modifying the paddings, margins, and font colors of this page
- adding some pages with the same theme
- rearranging the the way the blog list looks, with the post titles on the left, dates on the right.
If you want to experiment with themes, you can visit mgx's playground for bearblog. It's pretty straightforward, you can read more about it on ava's post on bear blog customization.
Credits to folkmoss, Sylvia, and Reedybear for their lists of customization tips.
My goal here is to restrict myself from all these unnecessary configurations. I'm still open to changing the theme, but I don't want to do it so often that I neglect the one thing that matters most for this blog: writing.