What you wrote about the loop…the theme actually does that. If there are more than X posts to the category, the older ones are not displayed. But I wanted them to be assigned to their ‘real’ category (Headling –> Featured or Featured –> Writing) and that was not possible. They were just supposed to move down from the upper part of the blog to the lower part.

Oh well, I am happy right now with the layout I have, so I already feel the need to implement something moving, something flashy … I am so cheap, I know. But no time to discuss that now, I am just approaching a pivotal scene in my story – finally!

In the case of you design I wouldn’t have bothered with too many categories. I’d simply have done a category “featured & headlines” and then set the loop to run through the first X posts in that category (X being the number you want linked at the top, plus the one headline post). So you don’t have to move old stuff out of the category because anything older than post X won’t be displayed anyway.

Then the real trick would be to integrate a little counter into loop so you can have it slap different display properties on the newest one (the headline) than on the rest and it should pretty much run itself.

But of course that would take quite a lot of wordpress/php tweaking to setup properly to begin with, so in a sense it’s just moving the time and effort into one single block.

Thanks for the compliments, I don’t really deserve them though since I basically just applied the template. Of course, I tweaked it here and there, but for the most, I left it as it was. And re-creating the logo wasn’t that much of a job. I somehow dread the task of creating my photo website though; I want to utilize the full power of flash, xml and all those other abbreviations and I don’t want to use a template there. That will be a larger project for the rest of the year.

And as you rightly read between the lines – if you are not blogging every single day and have tons and tons of content, these magazine styles are really more work than they are worth. They look great, but unless there’s a plugin or a script which will automatically switch categories for a post (for example, the oldest post in FEATURED is taken out of that category when the fourth post is assigned to it), it’s just too much hassle.

What are those loop variations you mentioned?

I like the light version as it is now, especially that the swirls of the background image are visible on the left side as well. As for the link color: have you tried the same color as the background of the left sidebar? Or a deep blue? Those two would match your current color scheme. If you want to stick with red, what about a brighter shade?

Seriously though congrats on managing the redesign. I’m playing with the idea on going life on my redesign over the weekend. Also thanks for confirming my suspicion that a magazine style layout – while nice – would be more work to maintain than I want to have to put into my blog.

Of course now you’ve got me wondering about building loop variations into a theme to work around some of those problems, but I think I’ll stop doing that and start writing. I spent too much time on my own redesign today already, so I really need to start the word production.

PS The light version is now the main one on http://www.jarsto.nl/testing/ – and I’ve even gone some way towards getting it MSIE6 proof. The one thing I’m not sure on yet is the link colour.