Under the hood, together with the latest release of WordPress, is a new theme I coded almost from scratch. I’ve called it WhiteShadow and it’s inspired by a long list of minimalistic WordPress themes and photoblogs. It’s made of only 10 files, supports widgets and has been tested on IE, Firefox and Safari. The new release also makes use of Keith Salomon’s Configurable Tag Cloud and Giuseppe Argento’s Slimbox plugins. The second is perfect with WordPress’ new gallery feature (after the small documented fix) and I use it for in-post galleries; AlphaHutte’s main galleries still use Felix Turner’s great SimpleViewer.

The minimalistic look might have been induced by my recent move to the Mac (after a life spent on PCs!). But this is something for another post…

The search of a suitable blogging engine was pretty easy: after some reading, I quickly chose WordPress which is free (as many others), has an amazing admin panel and seems to have a lot going around it in terms of add-ons and community. On the contrary, for the template (which determines how content is showed and styled) it took me ages (ages!). I tested a good number of the ones available in the many repositories around the web but none was polished enough or suitable for my purposes. In the end, I found Kyle Neath’s Hemingway which impressed me for its original concept and overall novelty. It took me quite some time to polish it and fit it to the style I had in mind and now you can see the results! It gives much more emphasis to content and features a white-on-black style (together with AlphaHutte’s historic yellow color) which I find perfect to display photographs. However, I still have many more ideas in mind and somehow I’m not completely happy with the style so expect to see some improvements in the following months. Also, I’m still transfering content from the old version to the new one so come back to watch the progress.

For those of you who are visiting Alphahutte for the first time, it’s a personal website about some of my great passions: travel, trekking, skiing, mountain biking, photography and technology in all its forms. However, expect to see even more topics showing up from time to time since the problem with me is that I get interested in so many things… Apart from the blog, you’ll find featured articles and reviews, a collection of links and a section with downloads (all free!). The site is also a showcase for my photographs, most of them shot during many of my trips around the world. The gallery is in fact the most rewarding part of the site and… the one you should head right now! Enjoy.