Postcards from the Funny Farm

A few people have asked me about my recent theme changes so I wanted to address it here in one place rather than in several emails and comments.  It’s been a very good thing.

Most people who read my blog know that I have been a theme changer since the beginning. Shelly Tucker even addressed it when she interviewed me. I have to experiment, it’s part of my nature. Ironically however, I have come full circle after literally hundreds of themes and am quite content with the best theme (for me) I could find: The Wordpress Default: Kubrick. Let me give you the top five reasons I have chosen to use this theme:

1. It is always updated state-of-the-art: When WordPress updates, they update 2 themes with the software: Default and classic (which you may see me use from time to time as well now for this reason).  Many other themes break and lose their look when you upgrade Wordpress.
2. It’s simple and clean.  Because I have tried so many themes and gotten carried away at times with graphics and layout, it is refreshing to return to my primary priority: content.  I want to write a daily column that works on all browsers and computers.  Default does that.  Writing was my motive to start doing this in December of 2006 and I think the scattered themes got in the way of that energy.  I may tweak here and there, but I have decided that clean is better and energy into the writing is best.
3. It has a big header for my wife to help me make Photoshop png’s on.  Do you like the one we made last weekend?  It is very special to me being my home town of Victorville (retro) and a postcard I used to have on my tumblelog.  Thanks to Sarah for the work she did.  I styled it somewhat after the “My Diary” theme I found a while back by Gecko and Fly.  It’s one worth checking out if for nothing else, graphic ideas.
4. Last, It’s familiar and what I started with.  Before I even knew how to change or upload a theme, I was writing ecolumns (as I affectionately call them) on Kubrick with the blue header.  To me, it feels like coming home.  I feel like I have so much going on now with this blog … I am right where I want to be.  I don’t want to get confused with flashy themes anymore.  I will limit my creative innovation to Photoshopped headers, sidebar features and links, and the artistry of writing these ecolumns, or articles, or posts … what have you.

My hope is that it will free my energies up to write even funnier, more creative and innovative stuff while presenting it to you in a dependable and accessible format.  In short: It’s a focus issue. I hope you guys like it and keep coming back often!  You won’t see much more messing with themes here, and if you do, my 12-step sponsor at Themeaholics Anonymous says I have to write a really long post to you explaining why every time ;)  What do you look for in a theme?

I’ve officially become a “regular” contributor over at Edublogs magazine which is edited by Lorelle VanFossen. This is an enormous sense of arrival for me in my writing career since education is my life and coming up fast behind is blogging.

Lorelle has been a hero of mine in blogging for quite a while now. She has designed some amazing themes that I have copied and learned form. She has offerred challenges to the blogging community to certain topics. These have helped me create some of my best posts at Postcards. Now, I have fallen into working with her at edublogs magazine: dedicated to furthering the cause of blogs in the classrooms. It is one of those senses of arrivals that one never forgets.

I have started a series today there on technology in the classroom. My second post is now up:

Powerpoint as Teaching Tool
I encourage you to read it and leave your comments over there. We’re trying to create buzz for this new magazine. even if you aren’t in education as a profession, your comments and opinions are valuable there and very welcomed to building a community! If you do comment there, I will stumble-review a post on your blog by way of thanks. This will bring you some nice traffic stats.

Respectfully requested by,

Your Damien Riley (the guy from the funny farm sending you postcards each day)

I’ve been looking for a new theme competition and coming up empty for several months now.  If you know of any, please let me know.

Because I think the net needs a new “Oasis” of award winning WordPress themes in one location, I’m thinking of hosting my own low-key theme competition including, but not limited to, Sandbox CSS skins.

If I do it, I want the prizes to be there so if you’d like to sponsor through donating a few bucks or maybe your time in judging, promoting, CREATING THEMES FOR IT, etc.  Let me know, I think it would be awesome and it would give me a reason to finish the theme I’ve been working on for 3 months! ;)

Tonight I was going back through some of my posts in an extensive series I wrote about blogging tech and tips and I thought they ought to be brought back to the front page. If you are a beginner, this long series I wrote last year might be like gold for you. It’s the results of my blood sweat and tears teaching myself blogging and web-design over the course of a year. You’ll find the Table of Contents for this series linked above. The one that helped me especially tonight and inspired this linkage was: “Blog Writing, Look Before You Leap.” I had forgotten about a certain Google resource to help with getting popular blogging ideas that get traffic. Sweet resource.

Another new idea I tried today after reading my post on 41 recommended plugins was to add the “Popularity Contest” plugin and create a “top 50″ page linked in the sidebar menu. This allows my readers to scan a list of my 50 most popular posts of all time (as determined by a set of criteria such as comment count, hits, etc.) , assembled on a dedicated page. It’s nice after a year of writing so much content. The only problem is, some of it never gets to the forefront. For this reason, my blog might not get the chance it deserves to be read by millions and get a higher rating. A blog rating is like a hairstyle: everyone has one but only a few are happy with it. Anyway, maybe these posts of the past year will help somebody out there get a better hairstyle. I could use your tips too, after all I am bald.

I’ve tweaked my theme from this:

To this:

This is getting to be a familiar ritual. When I change themes I have to extend the name character limit to accomodate my good friend’s long name: Jessica the Rock Chick. Most themes come out of the box with 20 charcater limit so I have to go in and make it 30. I hope she knows I am not bothered by this in the slightest. It serves as a great example though of how much is really invloved when you see me change a theme.

Every time I change themes I have to adjust many other things beside name character limits in comments. things. I’ve tried and tried but there is absolutely no theme out there that does what I want and need without a good amount of tweaking. A friend Nick Mercer asked me once, “Have you considered making your own theme?” The answer is yes and I have made several themes. I don’t offer them for download because frankly, they aren’t that innovative. You can get the same out there far more styled and strongly built. That’s why I work with simple themes and tweak them to “make them my own.” For example: The latest theme here at my blog is called Simplr, here are the credits directly from the CSS stylesheet:

/*
THEME NAME: Simplr
THEME URI: plaintxt.org/themes/simplr/
DESCRIPTION: Single column and content-centered. A different type of theme. For WordPress 2.3+.
VERSION: 4.0
AUTHOR: Scott Allan Wallick
AUTHOR URI: http://scottwallick.com/
*/

Here’s just some of what I’ve done to it so far:

1. Added background img url to via css
2. Used a container DIV to separate the header.php from the index.php template files.
3. Added Adsense Ads to the header.php template file
4. Created a custom css DIV to make the sidebars (at bottom) have a white background.
5. Added blogrolling.com javascript to the primary sidebar with a li id. (Blogrolling.com javascript allows me to add my blogroll to all my blogs the same and as I edit with one click, the add or deletion shows across all my blogs through the script. I’m a big fan of tossing the “link” php within Wordpress in favor of Blogrolling.com)
6. Added a li id for ‘Credits’ where I post image button links to my various”condos” online where I hang out. I also posted a typewriter image button to ‘Cheese Enchiladas’ my Best of Weekly Writing blog.
7. Added the Gravatar code (my hope is that many more of my readers down the road will join the free avatar generator Gravatar.com.

At this stage in my blog career, special styling is a must. Therefore, with a new blog, I paste in the many class elements I’ve created into the style.css file - I am posting them below for you to tweak and/or borrow as much as you want (giving back ya know). When I migrate themes, I post this (or parts of it) at the footer and it usually works. Because CSS is “cascading” you can have overlaps/etc so some styles need to be put right under the element they are modifying. Usually I don’t have to do this though. These all worked pasted at the bottom of the Simplr stylesheet. They allow me to make postcards, post-it type posts, specially framed photos, and anything else I can dream up.

What kinds of tweaks do you make to your blog? How’s your css hangin’? I help people for free, so if you have questions or want to do something feel free to ask. Are you happy with your current theme? Would you like me to post the best ways to find and tweak themes in future posts?