Doing a small experiment with alternative blog views this afternoon, as a study for a future upgrade to #WriteFreely’s theming abilities.
Originally inspired by “text-only” versions of news sites, plus a bit of Midnight.pub and Bear Blog, this one maintains consistent navigation between the index and post pages, and shows only the post title + dates on the index:
The design here is inspired by Riley’s theme. Titles are inferred from the post body when none is given, or changed to (Untitled) when none can be inferred. And of course it respects the chosen Blog Format, so you can hide dates or change the order of posts.
Besides helping me figure out what common backend elements we might need across themes, this is giving me a chance to see how we might simplify the base blog CSS and possibly restructure the HTML to improve accessibility.
I could also see this being useful for people who want to give their readers a lightweight way to read their blog (without a ton of CSS or custom fonts). So I might add it to Write.as Labs as an alternative way to access Write.as blogs once it’s looking solid.
Thoughts? Discuss...