Bruce Keener’s Lifestream

My primary blog, Keener Living, has used the Thesis Theme for about 18 months, and I feel it is time for a change. So, I put my Thesis custom code up for sell (dirt cheap, I might add) and have settled on using the Carrington Blog Theme for now. I decided on Carrington, at least for now, because it has basic-blog-look that I like, without being overly fancy like so many themes are, and Alex King and his team have recently done a fine job of documenting the Carrington Framework, which is indeed very powerful.

The Carrington Forums are not as good as I would like to see, but are probably at least as helpful as the Thesis forums are. (I've become a bit disappointed in the Thesis support forums, but perhaps that is because I have used them for so long ... they may be great for newcomers.) Neither Carrington nor Thesis Forums touch the quality of support provided in the StudioPress Forums, at least in my view (membership required for StudioPress forums). Developer Brian Gardner frequents the forums, and all forum moderators provide detailed guidance in answering support questions, plus have excellent tutorial posts, too. However, Brian's themes are for more elaborate sites than mine ... all I want is a blog, not something with a homepage and separate product pages and so on. Otherwise, I'd just use one of the StudioPress thems (I did consider it seriously, and could ultimately move to one ... just not yet).

There is a lot of excitement, from what I can tell, about the WooThemes themes. I must say they are generally visually attractive. And, looking at their blog and their Twitter communications, I get the impression that they offer great support. Without buying into one of their packages, though, I do not have access to their forums, so I can't really say what sort of support one might find there.

But, in looking at the source for some of their designs (via my browser's View Source tab), their designs seem to be heavy in javascript usage, and a lot of js is loaded into the head of their web pages. That doesn't appeal to me at the moment. Also, in looking through their showcase, I could not find a single example in which a showcase site had a Google PR of even 3 ... most were near zero. So that is not encouraging ... perhaps it is just because a lot of new bloggers are using their themes. I would like to see a big name blogger go with them before I invest any money in their themes.

Just my thoughts for now. I plan to stay with Carrington for a good long while, unless someone gives me good reason to consider an alternative.