OK, it seems to be coming together now. The header is working: I like the picture of Tommy, and I don’t need any fancy nav features. I had to hand-craft the page links when I changed the default font to a nice serif; for some reason the page nav inherited from the body style rather than the blog title. Mandigo includes some cute features to let you hide or reveal the body text and sidebars; I’m not sure how you’d use them (or know how to use them), so they’re gone. I’ve updated and reactivated some of the standard plugins, including footnotes and Fluency, and I replaced the moribund WP-CC feature with WPLicense, so I’m properly CC-compliant again.
The Shiny New Toy Of The Moment is Nerdaphalia’s Nerdaphernalia’s Pull-Quotes, implemented in Javascript. ((If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out this Wikipedia article.)) I think that they look really cool; the downside is that the Javascript that implements them runs right at the end of the page rendering. On most blogs that will be just fine, but on my widget-loaded page the load time is already pretty bad. The resulting user experience is that you start reading the page while things are still loading, and suddenly a pull-quote appears in the middle of what you’re reading. What’s happening is that when the pull-quote Javascript finally runs (after all of the Amazon and Google content in the sidebar, and maybe even after the analytics stuff in the footer) it builds the pull-quote, injects it into the DOM for the article, and the browser reflows the text body material around it. Ugh. That’s a good argument for reducing the page weight.
Still to do: replace some of the glyphs and tweak the colours.