Maybe you noticed this site’s new theme. I had been using blog.txt from the folks over at plaintxt.org with some success for well over a year, but I kept feeling that the project was outgrowing its own site. The right sidebar felt clumsy, the footer was embarrassingly empty, and there was no easy way to scale the navigation.

After casual theme shopping for a few weeks, I stumbled upon Modslider from Graph Paper Press. Many things I like about this theme (and these designers):

• Elegant, muted style
• Very slick drop-down navigation menu that can easily support a handful of pages
• Tons of space for widgets (which I use fairly heavily)
• Clean code – concise HTML and no shameless self-ads
• A bold “introduction” bubble at the top of the home page
• The price. I had no idea how expense WordPress themes are getting these days! With Graph Paper Press, you can pay a reasonable fee for access to all their themes.

I’d also like to note that I started using the WP Table Reloaded plugin. You can see it in action on the downloads page as well as the features comparison page. Here’s why this plugin is great:

• Import/export your tables to/from CSV, XML, or HTML. I can now use version control for my tables, as they’re just XML files. Sweet!
• Total control of the CSS. I actually stole some of my table styles from the Trac project
• Shortcodes. I love shortcodes.

Hope you like the new site as much as I do.