Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Happy 4th, a new look…

We had a relaxing and outstanding 4th of July in Edmond, Oklahoma! One of the highlights of our local parade this morning was seeing Darth Vader riding a Segway!  July 4th 2007 - 096.jpg Besides enjoying the company of family and friends as well as some good food today, I was thrilled to have time (at last) to update my WordPress installation to the latest version as well as find / tweak a new 3 column theme. (Thanks to my mom and son for perusing many options and giving me some good choices from which to pick!) I’ve been wanting to make these changes to my blog for some time, and I am not finished… I am going to restore an altered version of my original graphic to the top of my blog, and make a few other minor changes. Overall, I am pleased with how things are looking now. I’ll be interested to hear your feedback. The main things I was looking for in a new WordPress theme were:

  • Support for widgets.
  • Page tabs of some kind at the top.
  • A 3 column layout with an expanding body section in the middle, depending on browser window width.
  • Something with a graphic at the top and predominantly light colors.
  • A blockquote stylesheet that includes quotation marks on the side.

Other things were considered too, but those were the main items. I am LOVING widgets! I’m sure I’ll be making more tweaks as I discover others in the weeks to come. My main frustration currently is that Ecto seems to have stopped working for some reason with WordPress 2.2. I’m getting a “parsing failure” error when I try to post from Ecto, and I have not had luck Googling for a solution to this, yet. Any suggestions? Ecto is my main way of writing 99% of my blog posts, so I really need to get this resolved! For some reason when I edit a page and sometimes post a page from the WordPress web interface the resulting page doesn’t show up, it just hangs as a blank page… and for some reason I can’t delete several accidental draft “pages” as well. Not sure what is causing those problems, I’ve waited quite awhile to upgrade to the new version so I’d think bugs like this would be worked out. May be something to my local installation I need to change. Again, I’m not finished making changes, but I’d be curious if you have any feedback based on the theme changes so far.

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes’ free newsletter. Check out Wes’ video tutorial library, “Playing with Media.” Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..


Posted

in

, ,

by

Tags:

Comments

2 responses to “Happy 4th, a new look…”

  1. Melinda Miller Avatar

    I really like the new look!

  2. Tim Avatar

    The problem with ecto and WP 2.2 is the main reason why I haven’t done the update to my sites. I haven’t read of a fix for it in either the WP discussions or the ones on ecto’s site.

    Ecto is due for a version 3 pretty soon (http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/archives/001751.php) so maybe that will help. Also, WP just finished their WordCamp and is part of Google’s Summer of Code (http://code.google.com/soc/2007/) project. Maybe with lots of smart people playing with WP they can swat a few of these bugs.

    But the front end looks great, even if everything under the hood isn’t working!