Easily Distracted

After heavily updating some things on my blog, someone on my shared host server caused the server to die repeatedly. My blog was pretty much gone all of yesterday and part of the day before. Hopefully it’s all been resolved. Anyway, I’ve recently added a Contact page, updated the About page, added OpenID login option to commenting, added option to have comment followups emailed, added syntax highlighting for code chunks, and made some theme updates to accommodate all these changes. And I added avatars to the comments. So I’ve made a lot of updates, but I haven’t really tested everything. Let me know if there are any problems.

I’ve removed a lot of the noise from the theme. This includes all of the gradients and many of those nasty, sharp lines. Put Categories and Time at the top of each post, with Tags and Comments at the bottom. Made both smaller. Put everything on search results page. Added links to Technorati and del.icio.us from Tags and Categories pages. Changed the gradient images for header and footer (reminds me of rust).

Screenshots of some of the changes:

Original and loud:

Removed gradients:

Added solids:

Changed colours:

Some more touch-ups:

What you should be seeing now:

Comments / suggestions?

I finally updated the theme on my blog. Please take a look and try various things (in different browsers, if possible) and report any bugs in the comments section. Suggestions welcome, as well. Demands can go elsewhere… (you know who you are!)

This theme isn’t 100% done, but it’s functional and I wanted to get it up. The only thing I really miss is the turtle. But he could come back. Or something else….

If I was just writing a theme for Gecko-based browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Epiphany, etc) I would have been done ages ago. And if I do more wordpress theme stuff in the future, I vow to follow the KISS principle at all times. Would have saved me much time! Rather than try and figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it, just do something simpler! Maybe my next theme will be plain text. Probably not, though… I’m a sucker for tinkering.

Update: I forgot to mention, my goal with the theme on IE was simply getting it to display reasonably well (no giant bugs, and can be viewed). It will, in fact, look and feel better on Firefox. (I have been using ies4linux to test it for IE 6 on on my computer.)