A Note From Our Developer

I did not write the original code for the Literary Hub website. That was another guy.

But I did write a feature for launch, a long-gone dynamic bookshelf of books that had been recently referenced in articles.

I did not make the old WordPress theme into the look that everyone knew as Lit Hub. That was the aforementioned other guy, but for the last ten years I’ve been keeping it alive.

And that’s all the blame I have to distribute to other people. Every other technical problem on Lit Hub since has either been caused by or fixed by me. Oftentimes, both.

I met the publisher of Lit Hub at a startup he’d co-founded in Brooklyn and we were deep into the philosophy of iterating fast, i.e. it’s often better to get an imperfect idea out there rather than wait for the mythical state of perfection. In working on Lit Hub, we’ve continued that tradition, sometimes pushing things out that are not quite ready but seem like a good idea at the time. And pushing them out certainly seemed like a better idea than sitting on them.

Hopefully our recent WordPress theme redesign is the former. After ten years, we’ve rebuilt the site from the ground-up.

Like the people who complain when a show changes its theme song, there are often those people who don’t like it when sites redesign. So why would we risk our reader’s wrath?

Technology. Or… more, accurately, technology was leaving us behind.

Literary Hub runs on the content management system WordPress. And, when we launched, WordPress was barely into version 3.0. It’s on version 6.x now and a lot of the underlying code has changed. Which means our theme needs to change to keep up with it.

But I didn’t write the original theme. In fact, it wasn’t even written by the other guy. It was a commercially available package anyone could have bought. It was just slightly modified to become Lit Hub. And the developer abandoned it long ago.

Commercial themes are complicated things. In order to be successful, they have to be a lot of things to a lot of people and that means a lot of features we don’t end up using—features that, if not updated, will break the site all the same.

Additionally, responsive themes have come a long way in the last ten years. And, for those of you reading this on your phone or tablet, you might have noticed that it didn’t always… look great.

So a choice had to be made: try to update the theme everyone was familiar with or build a new one specifically for Lit Hub, with only the features we wanted and would use, that would look good on mobile devices, and that might also give us a chance to freshen things up.

As a peek behind the scenes on the technical workflow at Lit Hub, this is how it’s gone most of the last five years: The publisher receives a report of a problem with the site. He forwards it to me and I verify it. I discover the problem, describe how I can fix it and the approximate time it will take, tell him that if we re-write the theme, that it probably won’t recur, and he responds by telling me to quit complaining and fix the problem in the theme that we have.

Then, finally, after many years of begging to re-write the thing, he relented. And, as a result we can read the site I’ve plugged away on for a decade comfortably on our iPads.

I’m satisfied that Lit Hub is now set up for another decade of readership with a look and feel built on technology that is both more flexible and yet easier to maintain than before.

I didn’t code the original Lit Hub theme but I was happy to build the re-launch. And I hope you like it too.

–Colin Ferm, December 2025