Lutefisk

In an attempt to get my feet wet in the WordPress development realm, I’ve started modifying the great WordPress theme Nigiri Sushi by Eric Setiawan. The original Nigiri Sushi is a spare, no-frills, photoblog-centric theme that does what I wanted in a good photoblog display: it puts the photographs front and center with minimal clutter, and provides a very nice thumbnail gallery on the category pages (thanks in part to a clever plugin that allows one post to display on the main page and unlimited posts to display on the category pages).
There were a few things I wanted to change, though: some simple shifting around of titles, some comment work, and the ability to display text-centric categories in a different archive template than the photographs. Then I started thinking about how cool it would be to have seamless Lightbox support, especially with Lightbox 2.0 fresh out of the chute.

I’m not quite ready to hand over my theme to the unwary, and it isn’t different enough from Nigiri Sushi to really call it a thing of its own yet. But over the coming weeks I hope to have something that can be dropped into your WordPress themes directory and that you can configure with minimal difficulty. At the very least, it’s a fun project; I’m a little burned out on the Java stuff at work, and this is just strange enough to be interesting.

I’ll be calling this thing “Lutefisk”, I think. Though we can actually get halfway decent sushi here in Minneapolis–I can personally recommend Midori’s Floating World, a sushi bar in my neighborhood, and Little Sushi on the Prairie near my place of employment–this is still the land of lutefisk and lefse. And though I’m not Scandinavian myself–the Hartfords are a thoroughly Yankee clan–I can appreciate a culture that prides itself on lye-soaked fish. The boys and I had a fabulous time last weekend visiting Ingebretsen’s on Lake Street, eating Swedish candies and reading Flikka Rikka Dikka books, and I’m currently on an Ole Rolvaag jag in my reading habits (more on that in the future). So in honor of Per Hansa, Dikka (by far the cutest of the three…), and the fine folks at Ingebretsen’s, my little Lutefisk project begins.