I’d felt the itch for a few weeks. I wanted a different look and feel for the website.
It wasn’t that I’d grown disenchanted with the Tarski theme, as I hadn’t. Truthfully, I think it’s a fantastic layout and extremely extensible as long-time readers of this website know–using the same basic layout I’ve gone from parchment to something dark to a corkboard to something Lord of the Rings to, finally, Doctor Who.
But it had become familiar to me. I’d load up the website, and I’d feel… underwhelmed.
At work about two weeks ago I had to look up some information on a manga series I’d never heard of. (Which isn’t surprising–I know nothing about manga.) I found a manga review website in the Google results list, clicked the link… and found a WordPress-powered website. And it had a style to it that just resonated with me. I jotted down the style–most WordPress themes have style information in the footer for all to see–and when I got home from work that night I looked up the theme and downloaded it.
The current look is not that theme. I made two discoveries. First, it was based on Kubrick, and Kubrick is incredibly difficult to customize. (Also, there are quirks in the Kubrick layout that are like nails on chalkboards to me, but I’ll leave that for another time. Which is why even though I’ve found a LEGO theme I like, I won’t use it–it’s Kubrick.) The second thing? For some bizarre reason the stylesheet just didn’t render well in Opera. Opera, the first Windows browser to pass the Acid2 test, and this stylesheet doesn’t work? I spent about two hours digging into the code, and realized the problem wasn’t the stylesheet, per se, but the way the code itself was written. But rather than spend the time to fix the code problems, I decided I’d keep my eyes peeled for something else that appealed.
Yesterday I found a new theme that I liked. It’s blue. It’s rounded. It’s got three columns. It’s got some style.
I tinkered a little with the CSS coding. Line height was way too high. I wrote a print stylesheet (because I’m a firm believer in the need for print stylesheets). I added the necessary code for the tagging features from Tarski to work with the new theme.
I like it. 🙂
You just can’t stop tweaking, can you? 😉
It’s nice, though, for some reason, it reminds me a lot of Blogspot. And what happened to the Smiley icons that I could choose from?
No, I can’t stop fiddling around–it’s near summer, and I needed a different look. 😉
It is remiscent of Blogspot’s Rounders themes. Which is a design I’ve always liked–I ported Rounders to WordPress and ran with that for a while.
Note to self: copy the code into comments.php to enable the clickable smileys.
Wow, that’s nice! I particularly like the way the title’s laid out.