Sunday 17th June, 2012

Well, I guess you may notice a few changes around here. And I owe anyone who wandered in here in the last three or four days an apology for constantly meddling with the site design. What happened? Well, just my usual “here’s a good example of how not to do it”.

For the last two, or maybe even three, years, I’ve been using the Graphene wordpress theme [External Link]. If you follow the link, you will notice that it doesn’t really match up with the way the site used to look. That’s because I tinkered quite a lot with the underlying stylesheet and some of the functions. Because I do these things in my half-a**ed manner, I didn’t bother with a child theme. Where there have been updates, I just copied and pasted code over. Up to last week.

On Thursday evening I thought “You know what? I’ll do this properly. I’ll make a child theme and update Graphene to the latest version and it will all be perfect.”

My current answer to that involves swearing. There was something about the way the parent Graphine stuff was put together and / or the way I put together my child theme alterations that meant the changes that can be made in the WordPress GUI (the casual customisations) overrode almost all of my child theme. On Saturday, I gave up fighting the set-up and called it a day. I probably should have asked the developer for help (he’s probably a lovely person and it was probably a simple fix) but I decided I’d had enough. I’m now eleven years away from my computer science degree and I have no interest in working to keep up my skills.

So, after much playing around and trying on new themes for size, I’ve landed on the current one. This is the free Platform theme from PageLines [External Link] and all the modifications in layout and colour have been achieved with the WordPress GUI (yay!). Which means I won’t have to tinker with CSS and php. It’s far from perfect and I’m missing a few things extra to what you can see:

  • I’d like a Google+ link button up there with my Facebook and Twitter links.
  • I’d like links to work in the front page / archive pages.
  • I’d like in post images to show in excerpts.
  • I’d like a slider again so I can promote the online fiction, just in case you guys are actually paying attention to the fact that I, you know, write.
  • I’d like to be able to do different types of post.

But, I have my two columns, my excerpts on the front page and archive pages (you have no idea how few themes do that, comparatively speaking), the chance to use promotional boxes (see the bottom of the page) and it’s free. Also, I could do all of the stylistic modification without messing around with child themes and in other people’s coding and formatting. If I were to do that, I’d probably find a way to get everything I wanted. I could even get some plug-ins to patch a few of these things up. But, frankly, I can’t be bothered. After all, I just spent about fifteen hours over four days sorting out this much.

So, what else is there to tell you? There have been a few tweaks to the contents. I’ve added a “The Pack” page for the dogs with Finn’s page now being a child of that. Rosie’s (child) page will appear this week. The Gens was getting back up and running, right up until I got distracted by the website. We find out tomorrow evening if I can pick it back up again where I left off. I didn’t get any more weeding done but I did get that door waxed.

I’ve been good and took my dad out for a Father’s Day lunch – along with my sister (who’s birthday is soon, so “Happy Birthday!” and my niece – and then out to see Snow White and the Huntsman. My short review: it was never quite as good a movie as it could have been, the controversies / logic flaws (dwarves stand in for dwarves played by taller actors, women must be pure or damaged, lack of religion) were fairly obvious, and there’s a strong Princess Mononoke [IMDB: External Link] influence. Oh, and it has Chris Hemsworth in it, who is quickly becoming a new crush.

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2 Responses to Sunday 17th June, 2012

  1. Dylan Fox says:

    The new site is looking good! Particularly nice and clean. Although, it would be good to see the banner back up. As for the Google+ button, I faffed around with widgets and plugins for a while before I came across this: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/social-media-buttons-1?replies=6 A really simple and elegent solution.

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