This week I made some minor changes to the blog, expanding that right sidebar so that I could fit the Blog Rush Widget on it. I also re-arranged some ads and the other widgets. Visually it wasn’t much of a change.

I’m not sure what happened, but this week I joined a whole slew of web services. Jango, Last.FM, Rescue Time, and Clicky Stats.

Of course, WordPress 2.3 comes out today, so that should eat up a little of my posting time this week.

The Mumbler has been on me to start using tags, and ultimate tag warrior, but I have resisted. I guess one of the big features in WordPress 2.3 is tag support. Although it will require a theme update to support it. I seem to find that sites view my categories as tags, so I’m not terribly excited about that feature.

We’ve started having some cooler weather lately, which reminds me that Winter is coming up. Time to get my Jeeps Winterized, and get my house ready. I’ve heard that during the Summer, there is a slump in blog readers, so I’m curious to see what happens in the next couple of months when it comes to my readers.

Posted in WebServices, Updates, Web Tools, WebSites, WordPress, Themes 4 Comments »

If you are looking for a Free WordPress Theme, I would like to suggest that you visit the the Official WordPress theme directory. The options for filtering are superb, and it will save you a good deal of time. Also, each theme has a test site, so you can see the theme in action, rather than look at a resized screen grab. There are a number of other sites that have themes, but the filtering just isn’t there, and most of them upload to the official directory anyway.

In trying to work through my To-Do list, I spent the better part of yesterday looking at themes, but like the U2 song, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. I don’t want anything too artistic, or anything too plain, my tastes run somewhere in the middle.

What I would like is:

- 3 Columns - One on the left, one on the right. Those are for widgets, and other knick knacks, so they should be relatively small.

- Short Image in the header, with text on top - I would like to have the blog title and description on the header image. I don’t want the header image to eat up half of the screen. The image on this current theme just eats up way too much real estate.

- Fluid size - I don’t want to penalize people because of their screen size. That means either forcing people with smaller monitors to scroll left and right, or forcing people with larger displays to scroll up and down.

- No built in ads - I know people are trying to make a buck, but I really want to be able to choose how I thank and acknowledge them.

- A color scheme that is easy on the eyes - I am particularly sensitive to this. Bright colors hurt my eyes, especially at the end of the day, but black web pages makes me think the web master thinks they are ultra cool, or part of some underground.

- Other formatting - I just didn’t find the formatting that I liked all together in one place either. I know that is probably easy to modify, but the major things above were missing too.

So, with that out of the way, I think I am going to have to do it myself. I’ll be sticking with this theme for a little while, and start working on another when I get back from vacation. Yea, I didn’t mention vacation yet, but that will all come in time.

Thanks to all the very talented people out there who have made themes available. Really, there are some terrific ones.

Posted in WordPress, Themes, BlogNewsandUpdates 3 Comments »