Marcy Prochaska

I’ve tweaked the Boxed Apart theme for 800-pixel screen widths. Check it out using the Theme list in the sidebar.

I have been working on a new theme design, called “Boxed Apart.” The idea is partly to be more colorful, partly to use more screen space, and partly to improve other areas of the blog design.

I worked on a mockup using just a bare HTML file and a CSS file to get the design looking like I wanted. Now that I’ve uploaded it to my site, it’s not quite looking right. Mainly it’s a matter of some text colors, fonts, and text alignment. There’s also some extra bits in the sidebar that don’t need to be there, and some sidebar styling that needs to be fixed (the table that displays the monthly archives, for example).

Once I get it fixed up, I hope to create another version for smaller screens.

EDIT: Well, I think I have everything working now for this theme. (I was missing a bracket in the stylesheet, and bobafred at the WordPress support forum found it for me.) Let me know if you encounter any problems.

I found this great plug-in today that displays monthly archives in a calendar format. Much nicer to look at than the default list.

It’s that time of year when I have to manually change the copyright date on all my pages. I’m considering moving the pages into WordPress ‘Pages’ instead.

The advantage, besides enabling me to change the copyright date in just one file, is that it might be easier to edit and manage pages in WordPress — although I’m not yet convinced, after trying to copy the recordings page. I don’t like the way WordPress formats their HTML editor. The regular composing window is fine, but if I want to get into the HTML code, it’s all lowercase and almost entirely run together — I like to use uppercase in my HTML tags to make them easier to find, and I also like to use plenty of white space to make navigation easier. Hmmm.
The disadvantage (or should I say one of the other disadvantages) is that the URLs of all these pages will change, so that if anyone has bookmarks or links they’ll also need to be changed. I don’t really like the idea of doing that any more than necessary, but if it would be a good move in the long term, I’m willing to consider it.

So I may keep playing around with copying some pages into WordPress. You’ll see them in the sidebar under ‘Pages.’ The originals are all still there, and you can get to them directly or indirectly from the navigation links at the top of this page, between the header and the rest of the content.

I just finished the very time-consuming process of upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. I have so far only found one oddity: if you use the theme-switcher, you are redirected to a page that says “OK — the page has moved here” and you have to click again to get to the changed theme. Anyone know a fix for that? And if you find anything else that isn’t what it should be, please let me know.

Edit: The newest version of the theme switcher (0.5) fixes that redirect problem.

I’ve given up on developing a functional variable-width style for this blog. Instead, I have developed two fixed-width themes, Textile Medium and Textile Large, for 800×600 and 1024×768 screens respectively.

You can choose which style you prefer and a cookie will remember your preference.

In the sidebar, under the Author information, there’s a heading that says “Themes” and a drop-down menu. You can select either of my Textile themes, or see what the site looks like in the original WordPress classic and default themes.

Enjoy! And let me know if there are any problems.

I have three unresolved issues with the layout — so far.

One is that there are no paragraph breaks, at least none that look like <p> breaks usually do, with a line of space before the new paragraph. Why is this happening? I am guessing it is in the CSS somewhere, but I’m not sure what to look for. Any suggestions?

Second is even more puzzling. On the front page, in Firefox and in Safari, the sidebar box is higher than the content box. In IE they’re even. What’s wrong there? I want them to be even everywhere. And in Firefox, they’re only uneven on the front page.

Third, the archive pages only show excerpts from each post. I’d like to find the code for that so I can determine how long the excerpt should be, and I’d also like to make the “More[...]” into a working link with the text “[Read more] “

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Woo-hoo! I found a helpful guide to dissecting WordPress themes at UrbanGiraffe, John Godley, who even answers questions!

Obviously I still have work to do, but progress continues.

Sort of in over my head, trying to customize this template. I’m making progress with the background image, fonts, and main colors, but yikes, other details are overwhelming. For example, I want the body of each page to stay put — to clear the paisley border on the left (which I remember I had to remove for users of older IE… which reminds me I need to be testing all this to make sure there’s no problems for older browsers), and for the left margin not to move when someone changes the size of the window. But I still want the width to be collapsible, to avoid those annoying horizontal scrollbars. I’m not sure quite how to go about doing this. I almost wonder if I’d be better of building a template from scratch — I might understand it better than just experimental tweaking of an existing template.

I also don’t know yet whether I want to revise my whole site with WordPress (which offers static “Pages” as well as blog posts) or just keep existing static pages as is. That may affect how I customize the template — if I revise the whole site, I might change things more, but if I keep existing pages, I want the blog to more or less match.

And normally when I link to pages within my site, I don’t have to spell out the whole url, but just a slash and the desired page’s name. But since this blog thing is in a separate directory, I don’t know how to escape that directory without just typing out entire urls. And yet I don’t like the idea of having all the WordPress stuff in my main directory.

And…

———-

Not to mention I need to keep practicing for the upcoming anniversary concert and other events, and the rest of non-online life.

Hi folks,

I am in the process of updating this website to incorporate a blog. Blogs are “web logs,” like online journals. Usually there’s a main page with the most recent entries or posts, plus a column of links to archives, individual entries, categories, and so on. Most blogs also allow visitors to make comments. My site already has a photo gallery, journals about recording three CDs, and a sadly neglected news page; I think a blog would be a great way to integrate these things, and will hopefully make it easier for me to keep the site up-to-date.

Some of the things that I’ll need to do include:

• creating a template so the blog pages match the other pages at this site
• transforming existing journal-like stuff into blog pages
• creating categories

I think this will likely take me some time, so please bear with me through the process. Thanks!