Regular readers of this blog (are there any?) will have noticed that I’ve finally ditched the “green variant on the default WordPress theme” in favour of a “green variant on the default Drupal theme”. I’ve always thought the default Drupal theme was a particularly nice one, and this theme looked a whole lot better than some of the other WordPress themes available. As I’m too lazy to seriously customise or roll my own theme, this one won.

There are two main reasons for this change. The first is so that I can have sidebars appearing even when viewing a particular post. I have a little web comic that I started recently, and while it’s doing reasonably well, it doesn’t get anywhere near as many hits as this blog does. So I figured that with permanent sidebars I might be able to funnel a bit more traffic in that direction. If you like web comics, sci-fi or SVG you might want to wander over to “The Greys” and take a look.

The second reason was that I noticed that although the number of visitors to this blog is quite respectable, the average number of pages viewed by each of them is quite low – only just over one. That indicates that people are finding this site via a search engine, looking at the post they landed on, then not really looking any further – even when there are follow-up posts that may be relevant.

By changing the theme I’ve been able to add a “recent posts” section to the sidebar, and also taken the opportunity to add a “related posts” plugin. So now each individual post should also carry with it some links to other related posts – ideal for those follow-ups. And even where there’s no directly related posts, I’m hoping that the presence of the recent posts list might encourage people to explore the content of this site a bit more.

I hope you find these changes beneficial – or at the least, not detrimental – to your enjoyment of this site.