The new blog site is coming along bit by bit as I become a little more knowledgable about all things WordPress. Still working on it of course. These things don’t come easy ya’ know.

It was nice to see my two cohorts in blogging, Becky from Sprites and Bites and Dan from Live Dog, drop by the comments section to say hi and of course all the support from my honey. Becky’s site is coming along just fine and dandy and it really looks like she’s got a handle on what she wants out of it and where she wants it to go. Nice job Becs.

 At the same time, Dan and company’s endeavor looks like it’s about ready to burst into full bloom, probably sooner than they’re ready for it to happen but there has been a ton of effort put into it by all hands and now they are seeing the results up close and personal (getting slammed in the face by it is most likely a better description according to his latest post). So there has been a lot of “burning the midnight oil” going on as a business plans and strategy are laid down. Much luck and good thoughts your way from this end. Keep the faith and all that.

Now…as to the theme and tailoring thereof.

The first thing I had to do before I could tailor anything was to install an FTP client. Can’t mess things up unless you can get to them can you now? So in went “Filezilla”. This is where open source is so great. This is a beautiful little FTP client that seems to have been built for people just like us. Filezilla and a WordPress install are definitely a match for the blogger who has decided to “do it themselves”.

Look, the above or any other credit-given type of thing that might show up is not a plug or anything like that. I just appreciate things that are well done and “just work” without complaining too much about it, ya’ know what I mean?

Then came the dreaded “choosing’ of the themes”. A ritual I was strongly warned about. One can get lost in trying to choose the correct theme, the one that is “just right” and the “what about this one though” syndrome that can take an innocent beginner into the depths of theme choosing hell(!)…

Ok, maybe not quite that bad but I was warned.

Luckily, the first one that caught my eye was Ocean Mist 1.1 by Ed Merrit (find his link at the bottom of page) and after uploading a couple of other themes for comparison, Ocean Mist was it. Next, at a suggestion from Becky, was uploading the Sidebar Widget (like the one in the WordPress.com’s Dashboard) that let’s one customize their sidebar by dragging and dropping sidebar sections such as Calendar, Links, Archives and the “The Color of Tomorrows Socks” switcher thingy and moving them around to one’s liking. So after reading the installation instructions a half a dozen times, creating this and that directory and finally uploading the files into said (correct) directories, I was able to drag and drop to my heart’s content hence the new, more sensible arrangement.

Of course it ain’t done yet.

Once that was done I headed over Ed’s Ocean Mist theme viewer and read up on some of the comments which in turn led me to renaming and re-uploading a few .php files in order to widen out the post area on the front page and the single post pages and also putting the tags and comments etc at the bottom of the post where they belong…done. I also found by reading Ed’s latest post that he is planning on updating this theme to version 1.2 which, among other things, will add in the “previous” and “next” links on the bottom of the Front and Archives pages that were missing from this version. The only thing absent then will be being able to add different categories of links other than “BlogRoll” in the Dashboard and actually have them show up on the sidebar. Currently, any link that is under a category other than “BlogRoll” does not show up on the sidebar at all.

Whatever…nothing is ever that perfect.

The update is a good thing since the simple lack of being able to page back and forth between pages of posts almost made me pass this theme up. Glad I didn’t though. I feel it has just the right touch for the third generation of the blog. When the update is ready I’m not sure but I gather it will be soon.

Now, it’s down to the basic fine tuning of the thing which will probably go on for quite awhile but at least it’s to the point where it can go “live”. There is code to learn, plug-ins to choose from, things to break and tons of documentation to read. It’s rather scary having so much control over something like this but the big difference from having a “hosted” blog such as one hosted by WordPress.com and having your own WordPress install is that the blog is yours now and you’re free to break it all you want.

Later then, folks.

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