Fun with Hemingway!

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  beredd · Member · Nov 14, 2006 at 11:07 am

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  I now have a fully operational multi-author blog with the Hemingway theme. Yay! Anyway, to give something back to the wordpress community, I thought I’d share what I like to think of as innovative twists on the rather limited (but oh so classy) Hemingway theme.

  First off, the blog is in Swedish, but that shouldn’t matter as I’m only discussing layout options here. You’ll find it at beredd.wordpress.com. (It’s about self-defense in Sweden, and if you want to, you can read more about the topic itself if you click the “Information in English” link.)

  When I came up with the idea of creating a website for this topic, I was looking for a cross between a forum and a static web page. A multiauthor blog turned out to be the best solution – interactive enough, but enabling a clearer focus than an open forum. Thus, my blog tries to “imitate” your typical information resource site in its layout – a challenge with Hemingway wordpress.

  Now, I wanted to exploit Hemingway’s bottom bar to its fullest potential. This meant a very short static start page, which only serves to provide a “subtitle” to the blog title itself (and a copyright info link). The bottom bar actually appears to be the main part of the “start page”, and users were surprised (though mostly happily so) that it “travelled with them” as they read the articles.

  I needed a site map of sorts, so the Blogroll widget had to fill that niche. Instead of linking to other blogs, it navigates the site itself (to compensate, one of the blogroll links is a static link page). The yellow “pop-up” comments that come with the blogroll are a real benefit here, as they facilitate navigation for the site users.

  One of the blogroll links leads to a static categories page (the “Läs artiklar” link – check it out if you want to see what I’m talking about). This does away with the need for an entire categories widget in the bottom bar, and also enables me to “hide” categories from public view, by simply not linking to them on that page.

  I like Hemingway because it looks so nice and tidy, but some people found it boring, so I used the About widget to add a splash of color with a homemade picture assembly. Hemingway doesn’t have a banner picture option, but this made up for it quite nicely. Since it’s in the bottom bar, it adds a color splash to every page and article!

  The only widget that I use the way I’m supposed to is the recently widget. It’s immensly useful for previous users to immediately notice new articles since their last visit, so it definitely had to go in the bottom bar.

  All in all, I’m very pleased with the outcome. My only gripe is that I can’t change the tite words in the widgets. It makes no sense to have the headline “About” above the pictures, but there’s nothing I can do to change it (is there?). That’s a small price to pay for the convenience and flexibility of wordpress however.

  Hope this inspired the creativity of other Hemingway fans!
  All the best! /Stefan