Themes


I’m playing with a new Theme … one that has Skins and can be custom skinned by oneself. WordPreciousss is the Theme … I’m not linking to it because I do not know if I will keep it … yet.

I might keep it, might not. Might go looking around for other “skinnable” WP Themes.

Why I found it is because I was wanting to add somemore funtionality or style to my blog here, and was using basic2col-20 as a theme for awhile, and I stumbled onto the fact that the author had many themes and wanted to put them all into one manageable package … hence a Theme with Skins. What I was using was a tad older Theme by itself, which is now available as part of the overall theme as a skin.

So right now I have another skin chosen, and I’ve added my own custom header image, and my own sidebar –that’s “skinbar” in skinning language.

I do like the “page” overall, but might end up with a more minimalistic skin (flat). I am really looking to just create custom archive pages and get most of that info off the main sidebar, as well as Page info, and maybe have tabs at the top of the page with that info one-click away.

So what I have now hasn’t gotten me any closer to that, but I do have a few new tags added and well, now as I type this I am realizing that I still am wanting to totally revamp the look to be straightforward and well stretched out not to have content smooshed into one space, but also well marked up from a readers perspective, beautiful typographically, in other words. I really do not want to devote my time to creating my own templates, but I might just have to do that in the end … so hopefully I can do that slowly and just be happy with this or another skin for the while.

Eons ago I had my own theme here. It wasn’t grand, but then WP was not so grand either then. When the bigger upgrades came along I *whoops* deleted my own Theme by accident and didn’t have a backup, and that ended up to be fine anyhow, with all the new things added to WP.

I just won’t have the time to do a lot in coding, but the bug has bitten me to actually do something for the first time in many, many months, but with a baby in the house there is just not as much time where I am awake and able to be coherent enough to type/copy&paste code for a custom Theme.

Ah, really it shouldn’t be so hard, but I just want to be sure of what I am doing and not spend any amount of time in a wasted manner for this task.

So I need to have time to just straightforwardly plunk out what I need and add to it to fill it out. Skeleton, then Flesh, then Clothes.

Edit: Here it is, middle of the night after writing the above during the day, and I’ve already changed things. I installed SandBox, and it’s just the basics, and I will build from there. The Theme I was using before was based on Sandbox, but wasn’t “sandbox” and I’m super ok with just starting from the basics and using that and tweaking what needs to be tweeked and CSS-ing it to the nth degree that I need to. So this is a basic plain but currently –IMO –ugly blog for awhile. I’m playing with it LIVE and don’t mind airing my mistakes and messes. :rolleyes:

I have another blog, which I am not fooling with btw.


3 responses to “Themes”

  1. I’ve fixed this blog up a bit today. It’s not nearly as ugly as it was … but still has a ways to go.

    I made a new header and that I like. I do not like the default “menu” that is on the left right under the header though. I would like to make “tabs” that go nicely with the header … but I also need to re-do my “Pages” so that I have what I want there … like it is now is not how I want it.

    I did have many more “Pages” just yesterday, but I haven’t used them for a long while … my hen pages. I still have my hens, but they haven’t laid anything at all in a long time. I have others taking care of them since I got pregnant last year, though I have looked after them a few times since the baby was born, but over all it’s not me doing things with them, so maybe that is partly why they aren’t laying. It shouldn’t be so, but they were used to me talking to them every day more than once before. So anyhow I made those “Pages” ‘private’ so they don’t show up here now, without having to “code” things to keep them off the menu.

    Another thing on this blog is “categories” and “tags”. WP now has “tags” built in (add them to each post as you like) and a ‘tag converter’ to use if one wishes to in admin area, to take “categories” and make them “tags” instead. I have done so to a few categories, but others take thinking ahead about for a bit before going through with “tagging”. One thing is that when you have posts that have one category only, and you convert that to a ‘tag’ –your post then is “uncategorized” and that you have to track down the hard way, page after page in the ‘manage posts’ admin section.

    So it’s almost easier to start somewhere, front or back and just go through and “add” each post to a good category to keep, THEN go on with the ‘tag convertion’ of them all. That is where I am stuck though, trying to figure out which “categories” to stick with, which ones to delete, which ones to convert to tags … what tags to actually use but not OVER use. And so on.

    Oops, long enough comment. I was starting to think I was writing a post and wondering why the form to write in was so small. Oops indeed, it’s a comment form. :rolleyes:

  2. Freak out! My own blog tried to tell me I was malicious so, I turned off one plug-in and boom, I was able to post the above comment.

    I have “sandbox” installed as my Theme and firstly I had to turn off a co-comment enhancer plugin for WP because my “logged in” comment form wasn’t showing up on the page (I didn’t “know” it was the co-comment, just suspected it might be) but if I wasn’t logged in the comments form was there, and when logged in and the form didn’t show up it WAS in the Source Code, just totally NOT THERE on the actual browser page.

    So I tried turning of the co-comment plugin, and boom, there was my logged-in comment form.

    So now I couldn’t post a comment and it was something I have never come across on any blog, I’m a baddy and it’s my own blog and I’m even logged in to WP?

    The only thing different than ever is Sandbox. I upgraded WP long before, by comparison, and have posted comments fine since then, just not since switching to Sandbox.

    That’s OK, I’ve been looking to lighten the load of plugins anyhow.

  3. Boy oh boy, I just took out a couple of more plugins, and added a new one. I’ve had “loading” issues on this blog for a long time, whereas I didn’t really have the same such long ones on my other blog … both places I had CG-Referrer installed for a long time. I took it off the other blog and tried WP-Slimstat and left it at that there and didn’t switch anything over here … until just now.

    I deleted a few plugins and then added WP-Slimstat here, and then went into MySQL and dropped all the now un-used tables from the deleted plugins.

    Came back here and flip, flip, flip right to all the pages fast as I’ve seen on one non-WP page I have on a subdomain here load. So I can blame CG-Referrer for the slow sluggy activity here it seems, from this perspective with how it *seems* to be going.

    Yeah, I hadn’t dumped any data in a long time from the table for CG-Referrer, but even so, this blog has always been weird compared to my other, in how slow pages are, or how they don’t even load (only a blank page loads after spinning for awhile and so-called “finishing” but a refresh loads the page then usually.)

    I’m so psyched out about this –I just tried opening several other pages on this blog and yup, they are flying. Wish I’d just gotten rid of that before.

    Also I did get rid of Bad Behavior, that’s the one I was talking about in previous comments, hat called me “malicious” out of the blue, so it just doesn’t play nice with something, be it sandbox or how another plugin works with sandbox, or … whatever.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *