Okay, I’m pretty happy with how adapting the “Amazing Grace” theme is working for me. Most of the most obvious “problems” have been skinned. Done …
- Change the theme from fixed width columns to variables, so that (within a few bounds) I can widen or narrow the window and get more real estate. It also got rid of most of the right/left margins, which is fine by me.
- Added in my personalized styles to the CSS.
- Tweaked the sidebar formats so that bullets are bulletized and the headers have a line over them to separate them and, overall, it looks more civilized.
- Reshuffle the sidebar widgets between the two sidebars. WP doesn’t handle that quite as neatly as I’d like, but it’s still pretty simple. Having the two right sidebars lets me put more “should see” material at the top of the blog.
- Updated my various Pages, which now appear in the menu across the top.
Still to do …
- Tweak the colors. Alas, the header is actually a series of graphic images (bg.jpg) striped across the top, which makes it tough to change. And, no, I don’t want to use the Blue Grace version. (If I had my druthers, I’d probably do something red-toned in the banner.) Something to ponder.
- Change the post header to indicate the time of the post. Right now, it’s just doing the date.
- I want to change the link appearance to something closer to what it was in the previous theme (colored/bold). Or at least try it. We’ll see.
- Add a link for individual post feeds to the individual posts.
- Get rid of the sub-menu in the header. It’s showing the most popular (by post count) categories. Um … no, that’s not terribly useful.
- Fix the block quotes to indent more and have a little quotation mark show up. Again, I can crib what the previous theme was doing pretty straightforwardly (I hope).
- Play with the picture-fu that Ginny did to change the picture in the header to … well, more appropriate (and my own) pictures.
- Move the “ShareThis” doodad into the post footer along with category, comments, etc.
- Change the comment coloration. Right now it’s it’s back-ground coloring, which does help differentiate each comment, but isn’t what I really want. I’d rather have them all with a distinguishing color, or else (as I’ve seen on some blogs) have my own comments
- Play with hierarchical comments (which this theme supports).
Once that’s all in place, I can go back to my old blog layout and decide what, that I still don’t have, should be put on the new blog. E.g., links to Amazon wish lists, photo site, etc.
Plus, after all, all the other plug-ins just dying to be implemented.
Sounds like plenty to keep me busy. Though this is still a quarter of the effort that it was on my old blog.
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Well, hey!! I like the way you’ve set different items off in the sidebars. Nice job.
I’ll have to go back and clarify my post about getting the photo-badge working from Flickr. Basically, it pulls from a particular set that contains only images that have not been resized at all (or are in the same aspect ratio, but to be safe they’re all unresized).
I know what you mean about the color scheme being limited, but maybe the theme creator can be persuaded to come up with a couple more banner/background image color choices.
I’m thinking that shouldn’t be that difficult to do — replace a couple of color blocks with a couple of gradients. But, yeah, always nice if the author does and tests the work.
One of the things on my list is, once the dust settles a bit, hitting the tip jars of the folks whose stuff I’m using. The WP community tends to be free, but usually has a PayPal button somewhere to show appreciation. Once I figure out what I’m actually making use of, it’s only courtesy to do the same.
(Speaking of which, since I never-ever get much of anything from my own tip jar, or Google Ads, I suspect those will not be making the transition here. Which is fine — I am an Amateur.)
Thanks on the sidebar. I found the native theme to be a bit busy and cluttered, and didn’t feel the need to treat the two sidebars differently, so it was pretty straightforward to change the CSS. With lots of notes in case I have to recreate my work at some point. Making the columns variable was the hardest part. YMMV (obviously).
I’ll take a look at your notes on the badge and see if they are obvious — otherwise I will mercilessly harass you for assistance. 🙂
Sounds like a lot of trouble. I’m a lazy blogger, I guess! I like your new site and I don’t mind the header photo because I’m in “eager anticipation of the Hawaiian vacation mode,” but it would make sense for your photo to be more relevant to your life.
Is it a lot of trouble? Yeah, but (to use an analogy I’m sure you’ll appreciate), it’s like cooking — a creative effort where, if what you want takes a lot of trouble, it’s ultimately worth it. If you’re of the right bent of mind, of course.
Very little of the stuff I’ve done has been “must” stuff. It’s been “wanna” stuff. Though, in a number of cases, it’s been driven by laziness (e.g., the comments listings, the blogroll, other stuff I can use here for my own reference).
Updates: This morning I …
– Changed the post headings to (a) show full time and date (b) both on the home page and on individual postings. I also removed the post citations from the post footers on the individual pages.
– Got my Creative Commons stuff set up.
– Got the ShareThis link put into the footer of each post, rather than tacked into the text.
– Got the favicon working again with this theme.
– Found a keen plug-in for printing a “clean” (format) version of a post.