I’ve decided to let the live site run the theme even though it’s not really 100% ready. it’s a little work-in-progress but it’s nearly there. A few things need sorting out and a few of the pages are a bit icky, if you can find them that is. The site navigation is another thing to sort out.

I’ve called the theme Fitzy and it’s a child theme of Thematic. Once I get it working fully to my liking I may make it a download on here if anyone wants it.

We’ll see.

Anyway, I’ll do a new theme (most likely child-theme) by the end of the month.

Well. I’ve decided to stop using it and here’s why.

Too Many Blogs!

I keep realising (and then forgetting and then re-realising) that if I set-up too many personal sites or blogs, I spread myself out way too thinly. I’m not the most prolific of bloggers at the best of times and if I’ve got to race round updating multiple sites, I’m just not going to and indeed didn’t bother. My Sweetcron site somehow became my lazy-blog. I knew I could fire off a few tweets here and there and the blog gods would be happy because I was doing my bit. So then this site site right here becomes like a ghost town. I even started giving out my Sweetcron address as the URL of my web-site. I’m such a cheat.

What’s sort of swung it for me are a couple of reasons. The first is that the Sweetcron Author himself has stopped using his own software and cites the impersonality of lifestreaming as one of the reasons. He’s actually moved onto Posterous as his blogging platform and makes regular updates. The second reason is that there’s a now a Lifestream Plugin for WordPress. I’ve installed it and without doing any customisation it already looks pretty neat. You can see it on this page. I’ll probably try and get my own style going there when I can get round to it but like I say, it looks pretty much OK as it is.

So What Now?

So, now that the Sweetcron site has bit the dust I’ll have to write in here more. I’m still going to have more than one site running but this place here will be for personal stuff. A proper blog with the attraction of an added Lifestream. I’m going to build a second site for geeky/linuxy/webby stuff and that will be more the start of business enterprise. We’ll see what happens. I’m going to need to find another income stream anyway since The Form Analyst has now closed its doors and is becoming a free site. Which kinda sucks!

Onwards and upwards…

If you don’t know what Themetic is, it’s a framework upon which you pin a child theme. I haven’t touched one line of Thematic’s markup for this child theme (which is tentatively called Tamollie). The look of this site is created by my spaghetti CSS and a cobbled together functions.php file. Oh yeah with a few widgetty plugins and some Justin Tadlock stuff thrown in for good measure. Anyway this is what Ian says about his baby, Thematic:

Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.

Ian frequently posts links to new Thematic based themes on Twitter and I’d go and check them out. Some are really good and I’d think “I want one like that!“. Then I’d look at Thematic, suss out the learning curve (it’s actually not that bad) before retreating to Firefox and just bimble round t’interweb not achieving very much at all. So that’s why I decided to break the mindset and move to something else which ended up being Blueprint (BP) and Whiteboard (WB). Anyway, whilst fiddling about with BP and WB I started delving into the WordPress functions.php file to add in widget areas and what-not. That got me thinking about Thematic again because it makes use of the functions file like crazy. So as soon as I finished the last design I started mucking about with Thematic.

I decided that I’d try and create a look similar to Ian’s Themeshaper Site so that I could get used to working with Thematic and what you are looking at now is the result. At the time of writing the CSS really does look like a bowl of spaghetti but it works. I’ll tidy it up but the experience of the past few days has been me climbing that learning curve. I think I’m about a quarter of the way up it. It doesn’t look completely like Ian’s since I’m not worthy but you can see the influence .

So now that I’ve got somewhere to write again I’m going to move to stage two and attempt to mimic another site. I don’t know where yet but I’m working on it. The aim is to completely immerse myself in all things Thematic and eventually develop a child theme straight out of my own head. Well, that’s the plan anyway!

This theme I’ve made has been given the name Little P in honour of the latest addition to the family. She’s a five year old cat called Little Princess (formerly Bynxy) and we tend to shorten that down to Little P. I’m not going to make the theme publicly available (unless someone really wants it).

Making the theme was just an exercise in getting used to Blueprint really and to be honest dusting the cobwebs off working with WordPress again. It’s a year since I last did any proper work on a WordPress site other than day to day maintenance. As you can guess, this is Little P in the image. She’s not getting on with Goerge too well but time might sort that one out hopefully.

So, now it’s here I should be active again. Using wordpress with someone else’s theme never really rests easy with me. It’s like walking round in someone else’s clothes. It may look good but it’s not your look. Dunno what I’ll write about. Just the usual mundane garbage I suppose.