Another year another theme, I think I’ll keep this traditional alive. This year I went with the new official WordPress theme, twentytwelve. Officially launching with version 3.5 you can download it early if you want to be hipster about it. I went through and made a bunch of changes, most of which are listed below.

The semi-official list of changes that I remember:

1. New custom background via my Backdrop plugin (it’s so new theres not even a blog post about it yet).
2. Added the stacked page effect (which changes the stack every page load).
3. Changed the back drop shadow to a simple border because chrome was chocking with the drop-shadow on my retina display (it’s simple related to the retina display too).
4. Added separators between the menu items (thats a lot more css work that it should be with the way it was originally set up).
5. Added that awesome fade to the right side of the menu (one when in full view mode).
6. Changed the primary font to Helvetica Neue. (Hey, thats rhymes).
7. Rearranged the comment from on the full width version of the site.
8. Tweaked the spacing to make a page a little tighter while maintaining readability.
9. Changed all the links colors (I hope, there were a lot of a tags).
10. Removed the “Leave a Reply” link from the top of posts.
11. Tightened up the comments and meta info to make it a little cleaner and prevent it from making  the pages 5,000 miles long (not that I get many comments).
12. Changed the title from Thoughts to comments
13. Changed the read more link to stand out a bit more and have a flashy hover effect.
14. Added font icons to the next/previous post links as well as the reply link.
15. Tickled the footer, mostly text changes.
16. Gave the menu a white dropout so text wouldn’t collide with it.
17. Fixed an errant 1px off issue in the menu (yes, I’m a little OCD).
18. Inserted a very obvious reference to the greatest move ever made, Starship Troopers*, as well as other less obvious movie and general geeky-ness references around the site.
19. Fixed the mobile toggle menu (not sure if another change messed it up, or if it was just poorly designed before, but it looks and much better now.
20. Compressed the sidebar and made the dropdowns wider, again I get the big open spacing but I think that was a big overkill.

Thats quite a list there for what amounts to minor changes really. They weren’t made in any particular order, or even the order represented above, I just made the changes when I noticed them. The theme look fine in IE 7/8/9 with some minor issues (the menu defaults to the mobile one in IE9 and below, there are some hover background change issues on the menu in IE9). There minor and don’t effect usability so I’ll address them after the launch along with any dev to live bugs that work there way in there.

* Not intended to be a factual statement  everybody knows that Starship Troopers isn’t the best move ever made.