First, thanks to a little bit of additional CSS added to the theme, I have three colored callouts: a light blue, a gold, and a red. You can see evidence of two of these in the post about Pure Blog. It’s simply usage of the notice-info, notice-alert, and notice-warning classes. I will note that the gold used in the alert callout is LSU gold.
I looked in to adding a dark mode for the site, and experimented with three different plugins. However, there wasn’t a single plugin that solved what I wanted to solve in the ways I was hoping to solve it, and I noticed some site performance degradation with each of them when reloading, especially force-reloading. In the end, I figured it wasn’t a big enough deal for me to worry about. The Twenty Twenty theme doesn’t have an included dark mode, though it worked just fine with the plugins. And if, like me, you use the Dark Reader or similar browser plugin, you can just get dark mode that way.
The realization was this: I should stop worrying about my theme.
You know how it goes: you’re browsing someone else’s site, and you really like the design, the layout. Their choice of fonts, how they’re using white space, the flow of everything on the page. Are they using WordPress? What theme is that?
I was using WordPress before the Gutenberg block editor became a thing. I didn’t like the block editor then, and I don’t use it now. I deliberately installed the Classic Editor plugin so I could keep using WordPress as I always had. Which has meant that when I thought about switching to another theme, invariably that would mean having to deal with the block editor in some fashion, and I wasn’t keen to do so.
A reason I have been drawn to Bear Blog, Pika, and Pure Blog was the simplicity of their default templates. They’re all so clean and aesthetically pleasing, very easy to read. During experimentation with Pika in particular, I set it up with monospace fonts, black text on a white background, and lo and behold, guess what it looked like for the most part?
This isn’t to say that I couldn’t switch to another theme, or even another platform or service in the future. But for now, it’s not something I’m going to allow to occupy my time and my thoughts.