It’s possible that someone browsing through my website in, oh, the past twelve hours came across a really different look for the blog. Something… pink.
There’s a story there.
Yesterday afternoon, while checking out the WordPress support forums, I found a post from someone asking how difficult it would be to port her theme for a different blogging platform to WordPress. She had provided a link, I took a look, and figured it would take about two hours.
I e-mailed her, volunteered my services, and she wrote back.
She also wanted to know what she’d owe me. “Nothing,” I said. “This is fun.”
Sometimes I need an intellectual puzzle. How do you think I learned to write VBA macros for Microsoft Word and Excel? It was because making my job easier was an intellectual puzzle. Making a stylesheet for a different platform work with WordPress was the same sort of thing.
And, to be honest, it was what I did for my own blog a few weeks ago. I had a rough day, I was annoyed with life, so I took a free stylesheet from StyleShout and made it work with WordPress. Then, a day or two later, I decided I didn’t like that stylesheet, and took a different StyleShout stylesheet and redid my code to make that one work. Once you’ve done it, it’s not that difficult to do it again. 😉
Of course, I couldn’t send her the code without testing it. So that meant putting it up on a live blog. Which meant putting it up on my blog, to give it a rigorous workout. And which lead me to finding a few bugs in my code, which required retesting.
I’d finished the work by bedtime, but in that twilight moment of half-consciousness before waking I had some insights on how to do one or two things better. See, the two blogging systems weren’t entirely comparable, so some things couldn’t be done. That meant tweaking two more files, and I had to retest those.
In the end, I was very happy with how it turned out. This blogger will be able to move over to WordPress, and her readers won’t ever know the difference. 🙂
As for my own blog, I like the way it looks these days. Though, knowing me, I’ll get the itch, and a month from now, it will look completely different.
Maybe I’ll decorate it with pictures of the TARDIS decked out with sombreros or something. 😆