Recycled Canvas Theme by Creative Synthesis
Recycled Canvas is a two column, widget ready theme by Creative Synthesis. Though the theme has an absolutely unique look, the biggest problem you are going to face about this theme is it’s licensing issue. It is not under GPL or Creative Commons. That topic requires a bit more explanation which I shall post towards the end of this review.
To start off, we have a clean black and white header. Towards the top right corner there is a cute little “hanging” search box under the RSS feed options. That looks nice.
On the left we have the sidebar which is a standard layout. Other than the default components, we have a flickr feed integrated at the bottom of the bar.
Now the next thing that captured my attention is the unusual layout. The design is similiar to the side-by-side post layout made popular by Hemingway Theme. But Hemingway could display only 2 posts side by side while here we have 3 posts per row. Plus the spacing is well utilised to pack the posts.
But on top of that we have a special post with yellow background. This could be the latest post in a blog. A nice way to grab attention.
Totally the theme has a very unique appearance. But as I said in the beginning, the licensing is what that worries me. Here is what the developer has to say about this:
Essentially if you use the theme you agree to install a wordpress plugin that collects some data and sends it back to us. Mostly we’re after mousetracking data - the x,y coordinates that your visitors send their mouse tails to. For more information about this, see Ernesto Arroyo’s short paper on the mousetracking tools. This data is completely available for anyone to see (including, unfortunately, unscrupulous types like advertisers - although commercial uses are technically forbidden by the terms of the license). The intent is to use this for academic research in how people share designs, use blogs, and a variety of other purposes. It takes a few minutes to sink in, so please read the license details before you click download.
This means my visitors would be mousetracked in real time. I am not sure if they will like it, but I like the design a lot.
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Thanks for the nice write-up. I just wanted to point out that the current license agreement isn’t set in stone (there are no fully legal license terms) - it is also an experiment and is somewhat flexible. At this point it helps to think about use of the theme as becoming a junior experimenter, helping us out by collecting data.
The data collection is somewhat innocuous. We just make an ajax call on the backend of the plugin and don’t keep every piece of data. If anything goes wrong it should fail gracefully and not affect the user experience. We’re also planning to create a version of the plugin that allows individual’s running the theme to host their own data (which they are ultimately responsible for) and we can just spider a subset of it.
I understand that mysterious data collection is a touchy subject, but we aren’t a commercial entity. We’re a few researchers at MIT interested in new experimental methodologies and ways to get more intellectual ‘oomph’ out of web sharing. If anyone has any questions or suggestions about this process (since it is a little unusual) feel free to get in touch by posting a comment to the wordpress thread about the theme (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/111726)
this theme is very interesting. Looks like it is extremely suitable for a personal site of mine. Let see how it goes
If this is for research couldn’t you offer the plugin as a stand alone setup so other blogs could use it and send the data back to you? Seems like it might be helpful to diversify your tracking input.
[…] people have asked why we don’t release the plugin independently of the theme, especially since its ‘for […]
Just tried this out on my local test site. I must say that i am very impressed. This looks perfect for one of my sites, with a little bit of modification.
It’s amazing the amount of content that you can pack into one page, using this template
This theme also has options in the Presentation admin area of WordPress.
well, i just spent a few hours modifying this theme to my liking. (in case you are wondering, i’m just a bit slow :p). I still cant get over the fact that this theme released when it did, coinciding perfectly with my needs
Cant wait for the new release
Interesting theme and user license. I’m usually militantly biased in favor of GPL or Creative Commons, but after reading about the project, and knowing it comes from MIT, I’m going to give it a pass and am looking at using the theme in an upcoming project since both the appearance and the experiment fit the type of site I’m looking to build.