The Starrenburg’s Website

I use the ‘Dark’ Wordpress theme, designed by Wolfgang Bartelme from Bartelme Design (great theme, great graphic designer, thanks Wolfgang!) & modified for Wordpress by iLEMONed.

When I setup my site using the ‘Dark’ theme native tag support had not been released for Wordpress. I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1 so I though it was time to include tag support. I found this helpful post on the ThemeLab website. Couple of minutes work and dropped in onto the sidebar using a tags ‘cloud’. Easy!

As can be seen the most popular tag is ‘Wordpress’ - no surprises there. Wordpress is one of the best, and continually getting better, blogging software packages out there.

While I was helping my brother with his websites and blogs, I reviewed my own main website (which had not had anything done on it for some time) and blog.

My conclusion was that it would be good to have everything running from one platform as there are a number of obvious benefits to that:

1. Consistent look and feel
2. One software platform to use and be familiar with

Basically - look better and be more up-to-date with less work!

So… what to use? One of the number of template based website content maintenance programs like - iWeb, RapidWeaver, Sandvox. One of the more expensive CMS tools like DreamWeaver?

Problem was they all had something going against them - iWeb’s crazy auto-generated URLs (permalinks not!), RapidWeaver and Sandvox’s lack of depth when it came to blog support (which after all was where most writing was going to be done), and DreamWeaver’s cost and complexity.

What to do? Use two new features in WordPress - pages (which exist independently of the blog cycle); and the option to set any page as the ‘front page’ of your website - and just use WordPress for everything!

So I did!

This is a test of the two WordPress plug-ins:

1. Flexible Upload - for… er um, flexible uploading and resizing of, and thumbnail creation, of images.
2. LightBox JS - for stylish display of images on the page.

With these two plug-ins in place (they are very easy to install and setup) ad-hoc uploading and display of photos is very easy. For better, more formal, display of photos I use my photo galleries.

Images can be left aligned…

Or right aligned…

Or center-aligned if you add some CSS code to your stylesheet. Naturally, of course, with text flowing around the images.

All with a very stylish interface to bring up the photos in a larger image. Click on each photo to see.

Beat that Blogger!

Along with the move to the Mac I decided to update the WordPress theme for my site. I did some browsing and found this very bold and clean theme called “Dark Theme“.

The original design is from Bartleme Design in Austria, with CSS and coding for WordPress done by iLEMONed in China - thanks guys!

Coincidently, Wolfgang is a Mac user. I knew there had to be a reason why the theme particularly looks good on the Mac.

I’ve done a small number of changes to the layout of the design, most particularly to make the right sidebar one column instead of two to give more room to the body of the post. Also I made another template which removes the sidebar and the bottom (but not the footer) to make a straight page design which can be used as a ‘non blog’ web page.

Well it’s here! My site’s all new, fully designed for WordPress 1.5, theme - “The Low Sky”.

I had wanted for a while to update my blog to a native WordPress 1.5 theme, and had looked at all of the themes submitted to the recent theme competition on Alex King’s blog. But, to be honest, none of them had really caught my attention. Too many similar variations on a “theme”, and too little real estate for displaying content.

I looked at my then current theme (a converted 1.2 template) which actually had only been in use for a short time (from when I had started using WordPress) and thought - well I basically liked the main layout of the theme but wanted to have it as a native 1.5 theme. What to do - in the end I decided if there was none available which I could customise, then I would get a blog designer to develop one with me.

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Upgraded to WordPress 1.5 today. Followed the upgrade instructions and so far all seems OK.

The 1.2 version template survived being translated into a 1.5 theme. Had to remove “Links” link from menu as it was not rendering properly (started using bold) until I find where it is defined in new version. Of course it does not render 100% correct in Internet Explorer - surprise, surprise not.

Found a small bug - if the site has no comments (my site is still new) the PHP code does not check for that before it runs and it comes up with errors like “no for in foreach…”.

Seems to be much faster in saving posts.

——- Update ——-

Tracked down where problem was with IE rendering page in WordPress 1.5. Had to make 1em width change to stylesheet.