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My Wordpress hobby blog is 12 years old and is still using the same theme as day one. A few years back my favicon suddenly stopped working. I called Wordpress and they said my theme was deprecated and to get the favicon back, I’d have to choose a new theme… but once I did, I could never revert back to the old one.

My blog has thousands of short form posts and I very much like how they are presented. I just left it the way it was. I sincerely hope they never make me try to switch, but realistically I have to assume they eventually will.

2 comments

So your Wordpress host doesn’t allow custom themes? Because theoretically, you should be able to make a ‘modern’ theme that creates the same HTML + CSS as your beloved vintage theme.

I sympathise with wanting to keep the presentation. It was made in and for this context. It’s like reading an old magazine, you get so many extra clues about the context from the design. If a magazine does a redesign, it only affects the issues going forward. In my ideal world, blog redesigns work the same way.

I’ve done my share of maintaining and archiving older websites, where I tried to keep the design in place while updating the underlying infrastructure (or converting it to static HTML). The one thing I would sometimes change is to ‘zoom in’, multiplying all pixels in the CSS by a small amount, because the web moved to larger text sizes and screens, so older websites tend to look tiny.

Question: if it's a 12 years old blog, then I assume it's simple. Why don't you rebuild it with the theme you choose?

Granted, I don't know how WordPress works, or any if its technical circumstances.

I have 6000 little posts, each with a 300x300 image... and it's set up the way I like it. I just know that if I tried to import it into a new theme, something would be off that would require fixing manually, post by post, which I definitely wouldn't do.

Theoretically, the way to go about it would be to save several generated static HTML pages from your blog and work backwards from there, adding the necessary Wordpress PHP. Granted it would be intense work, but then you would no longer have the impending cancellation of your theme hanging over your head.