theme – D’Arcy Norman dot net

new minimalist theme

I just switched my blog’s theme to [Vigilance](http://thethemefoundry.com/vigilance/) (after using Thesis for awhile). I’ve hacked Vigilance a bit, to make the content area wider, and nuke the sidebar (well, really the sidebar just displays underneath the content div) and a few other things (like telling it not to show the author – I’m the only person that posts here – and turning off some of the comment-specific logic and display.

Doesn’t get much more minimal than this. No banner images. No sidebars. Wide content. No fuss. Exactly what I want.

redesign

I’ve switched themes on my blog. Again. And, once more, I just yanked an off-the-shelf theme and slightly tweaked the CSS to make it do what I want.

Before (left), using the excellent Journalist theme, and after (right) using the Magazine Basic theme:

They’re both good, so why switch? I was messing around with Magazine Basic for a blog at the Teaching & Learning Centre, where we needed a more magazine or newspaper feel to it. And was struck by how much I liked the theme. I like that it’s very clean, but polished. It only shows excerpts for the last few articles on the front page, and will show small versions of images if they’re available for a post. I like that it’s not purely river-of-posts – there’s no “Older Posts” link on the front page. Once things trickle off the front, they’re accessed via the category and tag pages. No humans use the “Older Posts” stuff, and googlebot has a full index of the site, so that design was redundant clutter anyway. I like that full posts aren’t on the front page – that means more posts are visible at a glance, and most people won’t even notice because they’re coming from Google (directly to a post anyway) or RSS.

I’ll give it a try for awhile. But so far, I’m really liking it.

monotone photoblog wordpress theme

I just installed the development version of the monotone theme over on my mindfulseeing.com photoblog. What a cool theme. It adapts the colours of the post page based on the colour palette used in the first image on a post. AND, it provides a great archives page with thumbnails from each post. Very cool. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for in a photoblog theme.

Because it’s not an officially released theme (yet) you have to check it out via the subversion repository, but that’s a pretty simple call to svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/monotone/

Here’s a snapshot of the post page, with background colour pulled automagically from the photograph:

And, the archives page with date selector:

Thanks to Weblog Tools Collection for the tip, and Automattic for creating the theme!

Update: The monotone theme uses a function called image_scrape() which does some cool stuff for the post display on the web, but had the nasty side effect of yanking images from the RSS feed. I fixed my copy of functions.php to avoid the problem, and allow full images in the feed. Here is my trivial modification to the image_scrape() function:

// remove image tag from post_content for display
function image_scrape($entry) {
	// don't scrape the image for the feed
	if (is_feed()) { return $entry; }
	//remove image tag
	$entry = preg_replace('/<img [^/>]*src=(\"|\').+?(\1)[^>]*\/*>/','', $entry); /* */
	//remove any empty tags left by the scrape.
	$entry = str_replace('<p> </p>', '', $entry);
	$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
	$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
	$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
	return $entry;
}

Random Image Rotator Working Again

It’s the Week of Things Working Again. First the Flickr albums via FAlbum, and now the rotating banner image, via “Automatic Rotator.”

It’s a simple php script that you put in a directory of images, then every time it is called, it spits out a random image file from that directory. I modified my css file to point the background of the banner div to that script, so every page view automatically gets a random image. To add a new image to rotation, I just drop it in the directory.

Again, if you don’t feel like hitting command+R a couple dozen times to see them all, just hit the handy dandy Banner Image Lister – another simple script that dumps out all files in a directory (including the rotator.php, which will appear to duplicate one of the images at random, and the index.php file itself, which will appear as a broken image).

Thanks to Cole for some gentle nudging to get me to put this together, and thanks to Automatic Labs for putting Rotator together.

It’s the Week of Things Working Again. First the Flickr albums via FAlbum, and now the rotating banner image, via “Automatic Rotator.”

Thanks to Cole for some gentle nudging to get me to put this together, and thanks to Automatic Labs for putting Rotator together.

New theme etc…

I just switched the default theme of this blog to the latest K2 theme by Michael Heilemann at binarybonsai.com. Michael created the Kubrick theme that I was using before (and which was also adopted as the default for all new WordPress installations).

K2 is a really nice design, with some great thought to functional layout. It supports a boatload of useful plugins, and displays their magic if they are installed.

Check out the cool ajax-powered search dealie – just start typing a query, and out pops a list of matches. Pretty cool. Comment submission also uses some ajax juju, but it’s a bit funky at the moment, and isn’t quite fully baked yet. Still, quite cool.

So far, I’ve lost my fancy schmancy banner image rotator, but that’s not such a bad thing. I’ll work on adding it back in when I get a chance – I have to recreate the images for the new wider design anyway).

Also, while having another less-than-fully-productive day staying at home with The Boy™ while Janice is sick in bed, I was able to download (but not yet compile successfully) the Ming library for creating .swf files. King suggested this during the Pachyderm developer’s conference call (which I missed because I am out today), and it looks like a much nicer solution than Josh and I were thinking of – Ming would provide a nice happy medium, where we just alter how we generate our .swf-wrapped images, and the dozen flash template files don’t need to be any the wiser. The other option is JSwiff, but it’s a much lower-level library, meaning we’d have to be messing with the icky details of the flash file format. With Ming, we just create objects, and tell it to do stuff. Much nicer 🙂

K2 is a really nice design, with some great thought to functional layout. It supports a boatload of useful plugins, and displays their magic if they are installed.