Adventures By Design

As you can see, our blog looks a little different. For the past few weeks I’ve been redesigning the way our blog looks, using Chris Pearson’s original Cutline Theme as my starting point. Actually, if you compare the two, you will see that most of the changes I made were cosmetic – things like changing the colours and fonts, with the exception of the way the post title, author, and date display. Cutline made this super easy to do because it has two style sheets: the complete normal one, and custom one. To customize the look of the blog, all a person has to do is add or modify the custom style sheet, and their changes will automatically replace the normal one. If that makes no sense to you, think of it as a safety net: the complete style is there under the surface, ready to leap into action if when I do something wrong.

I’m happy with our blog now. I’ve got a sense of accomplishment, plus I’ve learned all kinds of new skills. Although it may be too ambitious to create my own theme (although I’d love to someday), I feel confident that I can take other themes and modify them to suit my (or others’) needs (cough, Janet). I’m surprised at how active the WordPress community is: there are thousands of folks are out there volunteering their time and knowledge to help others. It’s great! And like Firefox and Wikipedia, WordPress shows that you don’t need a gianormous budget, nor a vertical organizational structure to achieve quality results.

I like the overall color scheme. These were the colors we choose several months ago when we first started working on our professional teaching portfolio (take a look if you are curious; it should be finished in the next couple days).

I like the way many blogs display the post date in a small box beside the post’s title. It took me a while to figure out how to do it, even though looking back it seems simple. It wasn’t until I dissected HeyLucy that I really got it. I wonder if not putting the year is going to bit me on the nose later on?

The images in the header will randomly change every time you load the page. Nifty, eh? Refresh (Ctrl+R) your browser to see a different photo. I figure I’ve got hundreds thousands of photos that I’m not doing a whole lot with, so why not put them to work? Watch out for Nathan making a guest appearance, and a post-nuclear downtown Seoul.

Now I need your help. If there is anything that doesn’t work properly, or look right, please tell me! Please. I’ve done my best to find all the bugs, but I know I’ve missed some. While you’re at it, if there is anything that you’d like to see added or changed, please tell me that too.

Ok, I’m off to bed now… 2:30am. Not bad, considering it was 4:00am last night.