Easily Distracted

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.)

One things that WordPress is sorely missing is basic image handling. Blogging with images should be fast. Previously, I had gone as far as writing a script that would take all images in a directory, resize them, create thumbnails, and output the required html that I would then paste into the editor. Before that, I used a plugin that would would automatically generate thumbs, and it was great for a while. Until I upgraded, and didn’t enable the plugin… if you go see those old pages, you’ll notice they’re broken. So WP either needs a plugin that doesn’t break when you don’t have it installed, or a default will-always-be-supported image plugin. Since the latter doesn’t exist, I looked for the former. I’ve been using Flexible Upload for a while now, and it’s made posting pictures WAY less painful. Un-installing the plugin won’t affect any pages, because it just generates static content. So that’s what I use and recommend for uploading a couple pictures to a personal WordPress blog. Any other suggestions?

Screenshots follow:

This plugin sits in the Upload area….

After uploading an image…

Clicking Send to editor

I know I said I’d try to blog every 2-3 days…. Well, does silently updating backend stuff count? Not much, but I set up Feedburner, Technorati, and upgraded to the latest WordPress (2.1.3). At this rate, maybe I’ll even hook into Facebook and other social sites. Look out 2001, here I come.

Also played with iGoogle a bit – Google’s answer to a personalized homepage. Since I use a few of Google’s online services, it may prove useful for me. Currently, I have Google Calendar, Gmail, a couple world clocks (Vancouver/Japan/Sao Paulo), the weather, Google Reader, and Google Docs.

Cool. The new WordPress auto-saves posts. I’m tired. I sleep now.