WARNING: I’m messing with the blog’s layout again

October 27, 2005 by paul
Filed under: Uncategorized

I’m trying to reduce the length of the main page by breaking the side bar into two.

If it looks ugly right now, come back in a couple of hours and I should have fixed it.

Update: OK, so I haven’t broken it (yet!) but I have downloaded a few “off the shelf” layouts that I could “borrow” from, plus there’s a really interesting AJAX-based theme called “Bloxpress” that I want to investigate. While I’m not messing around, I’ll put it back to a basic 3-column layout; it probably means some of my tracking tools and other “clever” stuff won’t work, but you should be able to read the blog OK. I’m back to tinkering for a bit….

Themes I’m testing out:

Aesthetic – not bad, but I’d have to get rid of the forced capitals and the borders on linked images, and make the whole thing a bit wider
bionicjive – I quite like the simplicity but it’s based on tables! Aargh!
blue-radiant – again, the columns need to be wider
cleanlook
Fall-In-Love – some formatting work needed, plus see comments on Aesthetic above (same author)
flex – nice and clean
head – definitely potential to do some artistic but less garish with it
identification-band-quadruplet-boyish – I like the idea of four columns, but the main content needs to be wider and stand out more
identification-band-triplet-centered-boyish – clear, but the columns all need to be wider
identification-band-triplet-right-boyish – ditto (same layout except for placement of one column)
relaxation_3column – the Fickr column could be replaced by my BlogRoll
safety – I don’t like the colour combination, and the search box overruns the left column; needs a bit of work before I’d use it
stanch – nice and clean, if maybe a bit too basic?
three-col-kubrick – probably the best start-point for making my own theme
trident – the fonts are quickly ugly, but other than that OK

The long-term aim is to have a few themes for users to choose from, but I need one that I’m happy with as a basis – there’s a few plugins that I want to checkout/add, and I want to make sure the same toys as available in each theme.

Oh, and if you see anything highlighted like this it just means that’s the CSS element I’m currently working on – no significance other than that.