On theme modifications…
I easily have a change of heart. I changed the index page for Arthemia a bit to this current theme. Now I want to make more changes to it. I can never decide how I want this page to look. Or rather, I have a multitude of designs that I want to try out to finally decide which one of the theme version that I love the most and should get the honour of being used by me.
This is pretty ego of me I know but I can´t help it. What I want to do this time is to take the featured section and move it under a enlarged Headline section. And I want to add the sidebar again to the index page.
So many choices, so little time. The worst part about it though is that it feels like I only do this because I have a fondness for editing themes and I can never decide to use only a single theme. I admire those that are able to keep to the same theme year after year. I love designing even though I suck at it. If I could then I would probably have tried to create a own existing theme, but when great themes like Arthemia exists then I don´t have to.
At first I made the theme wider. Then I thought it got to wide so I went back to the original width of Arthemia but made the sidebar smaller since I don´t really like it when the sidebar takes up more than 1/3 of the contents which it did. Good if you have loads of stuff in the sidebar, but since I try to keep it nice and clean it doesn´t work for me.
It is loads of fun to edit a theme to make it work more like the way you want it to. The one thing that I want to find though is a excerpt limiter so I can set how many words will be in the excerpt as of now it isn´t that fun to see your theme breaking down when the excerpt is to long.
Yes I am lazy as I could write specific excerpts for each and every post but it is to much work to write those manually as I don´t want to simply cut & paste the words themselves but want to write good short sentences for each and every one of the posts in that case.
One big problem when you change a theme is that every theme is made differently and coded different. Which can take one theme to be a real ease to make modifications to while another has such badly written code that you can´t do shit with it. Arthemia is a nicely coded theme so it´s quite easy to make modifications. As long as you know what you´re doing. I´ve started over from scratch a lot of times. But the results have been pretty good so I can´t say I wasted my time on it.
Besides, as I´ve said before. It´s FUN!! I´m not good enough to help people around with the code part, but I´m slowly slowly learning wordpress and it´s commands. Now all I need to learn is how to create a theme from scratch and then maybe we can start talking. But I don´t think I´ll get that good anytime soon so.
And I´ll end this with a question: Do I need to make more modifications to Smexy Arthemia or should I just leave it as it is? If you want I can add some images on my progress, but that will have to be at a later time.
edit – I´ll just post a little screencap of how the new theme modifications would turn out. Late as usual :p
edit 2 – The above image is trashed so for now I will keep this design. Might change in the future though :p Who knows?
Go easy on the images, mate. I think right now, you’re striking a good balance between flashy, well chosen images and good ole text. I suggest trying round corners with CSS3 before you try to add more images to the theme, maybe that’ll help you attain the look without lots of images (wtf is my text cursor under IRIX, I can’t see where I’m typing). I don’t entertain the idea of icons, because most of the time they are irrelevant to the text. Suppose I saw a post on somebody’s athlete’s foot and a picture of Ranka as an icon? Or clicking on the Ranka icon just to see somebody’s rant on the current political situation? Icons set expectations for the reader, when he sees something he knows, he expects the subject to be related to that icon.
The same also applies with images in blog posts. With a few exceptions, I’ve always tried to make the images related to the post. I’ve found whenever I try to do that, it always limits what I can write about.
So yeah, that’s my philosophy on images. And delete the first comment I posted. As for Linoluna, it looks like a very magazine-style theme, and it fits perfectly with their posts, which aren’t really blog posts, but more like editorials. Your blog isn’t about editorials – well, that’s what I think. That’s why a featured section didn’t turn out well.
Oh, and the AJAX image zoom-ins that blank out the rest of the page when you click on them? I hate them. If I’m on a slow connection, I can’t read anything else while I’m waiting for the image to load, and most of the scripts are coded such that I can’t close the damn thing until it’s finished loading. Besides, the whole thing is design to bring attention to the image, instead of the article, when you click on it, which can be achieved through other means (such as opening the image in a new window). The fact that those scripts dark en the rest of the page belies that fact.
…well there’s a bug for you to fix.
ritchan’s last blog post..Some computers just refuse to work
Yup. I try to find a topic I want to write about. Then I have to go trough my image folder for a suitable image.
Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don´t. Or sometimes it´s just so random or small catchy thing that has to do with the post itself only I myself understand the reason.
I do not know CSS3 or how to work with it. At first this theme has rounded corners for the menu but I took that away as I didn´t want to use it.
I hope I take it easy on images. if you see the screencap at the end of this post you see how the new design is at the moment. Along with that the number of posts on the frontpage is down to 5 so in that aspect it is way less posts on the frontpage than it is now as now we have a Headline 1 post, 5 Featured posts and then 12 posts on each side.
And you´re right about Linoluna and that. But I do find the theme very entertaining and good looking. Which I want to have myself :p but this theme is also sexy and I do like it myself. So I don´t know why I want to keep changing it all the time except for that I find coding pretty fun.
Would be better if it were as in Ar Tonelico, I hook myself up and take a “dive” into the code and help it out personally up close and personal
edit – wow, I missed that last part ritchan. I find it very neat that the page loads up the image ontop. Since I hate opening it in a new window. But then again i do understand why you hate them.
I´m moving back and forth all the time with those things wether to use or not to use them.
and what bug did you find now?
I also love being minimalistic but I’ve always preferred double sidebars and yes, I also think this theme is sort of wide. Double sidebars are always helpful in balancing the symmetry of your blog if you’ve got too many stuffs like long blogroll.
If I have something against this present theme of yours, that would be the overly projected avatar of the commenter since it is way too large that it wastes space. IMO only XD.
The first time I had my blog I also wanted my blog to look unique so I always had a change of heart so I think it is okay to always edit your themes since it represents the author’s personality as well.
foomafoo’s last blog post..The three of you are stoopid.
It is wide so that I can have images that are about 700px wide since I feel that if they are smaller it doesn´t look that good. But that is me.
Double sidebars is something I´ve never wanted to have as I find it hard to fill them up. Unless I should give one sidebar only ads/affiliates. And that wouldn´t look good either, not with this theme. Then I would have to find a new theme :p Which is out of the question at this point. Maybe sometime later on, but not now.
For avatars, I find that they should be about this size as getting a visual image of the person behind the comment is a good thing for me. I don´t like themes where the avatar is a measly 5px large, it´s way to small. Sure 100×100 as they are not can be considered quite big, but I like em big, at least for now.
What can I say, coding is fun
Still looking around for themes that I find look good and I might incorporate something from those that I find in the future.
I’ve been meaning to ask you this… can I also use your theme?
send? LOL! XD
rollchan’s last blog post..Cross Days
I don´t see why not. I´ve made changes to the original theme so you might want to take a look at that as well.
But one thing you´ll have to edit yourself is in the index file so that the headline and featured posts won´t appear in the list as well.
And also, leave the footer intact, if you make changes, add stuff, do not change the way the footer is now :p