Marcy Prochaska: Hammered Dulcimer

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.