I should have told you about the theme

Sixty, that rather unique blogger and friend of mine, has reminded me that I have been remiss in posting about the new theme change here at the site. Well, he’s right. I should have said something earlier but I figured that the folks who visit on a regular basis around here are already used to me flip-flopping around themes like I was trying on clothes or something.

Of course, I should never assume.

It’s all K8’s fault actually. She tried on this theme quite awhile back and I have to admit that I fell in love with it when I first saw it. A month or so later I still couldn’t get the thing out of my head so I emailed K8 and said I was going to play copy cat and snag her looks (her site’s look…not hers), she said fine and dandy so here it is.

The theme is called Absynthe and the author is Chris Wallace who is also the author of the well known Rusty Grunge theme. To me the theme has that nice comfortable feeling I’ve always wanted to wrap around the blog, something folks will feel comfortable with when they first arrive rather than being jarred out of their knickers by the garish wall paper and bad color coordination like some sites I’ve been to in the past. Loading time for the theme is plenty quick so no complaints there either.

The theme’s been updated by the author once already since it first arrived here to bring it up to date with WordPress 2.7.1 and 2.7’s threaded comments features, something I’ve actually come to like much to my surprise. Always though I’d stick with the old non-threaded way of doing things but that’s what I get for thinking.

I also added a couple of my own modifications as well.

As is, the theme doesn’t call the comments template for “pages”, only for posts so I added the appropriate PHP snippet to the theme’s “page.php” and that was taken care of.

Another matter involved the theme’s links in that they were the same color as the regular text with only a subtle line underneath (I do like the way the line is done though). I thought this tended to make the links disappear within the text especially in the sidebar so I changed the color of the links to the same blue that’s splotched all over the date you see in the upper left corner of this post. At least the links stand out better this way and besides—I like it.

There’s also no distinction between “active”, “hover” and “visited” in the “style.css” file for links at the moment but I’ll get to that later. This is all minor stuff anyway and all changes are purely subjective on my part. Making it mine so to speak.

So thanks goes to Chris for coming up with something I can actually live with in a theme and to K8 for providing such a wonderful site to go find it at.

I might actually keep this one for awhile.