Day: April 4, 2008

RE: [http://wordpress.com/blog/2008/04/04/new-dashboard/]

Well, after checking out the ‘New Dashboard Design’ of WordPress.com, I found some additions that worked well for me. The first overhaul was the long awaited Manage>Tags section where I’ve reduced tags from 453 to 225 (which is one of my personally identifiable codes) or from 23 pages to the current 12 pages (of 20 WordPress items per page).

I found lots of blank tags in the beginning of the page, misspellings throughout and other redundant or useless tags that I’ve deleted and modified some of which were consolidated, logically, for my purpose, of course. I found that there was a spell checker for adding these tags into my old posts.

I suppose my two entries under the <en.forums.wordpress.com> regarding categories and tags were taken into consideration due to some of my tags should not have been included in the first place. Unfortunately, I would have to tinker with an SQL program (I sort of know from one of my former jobs) under the self-hosted websites found under WordPress.org to do some mass updates, like categories and word replacements.

I found other but minor annoyances. For examples, after modifying the tags and saving some of my posts, I would navigate away from this section and find the Windows Internet Explorer error message below:

Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?
The changes you made will be lost if you navigate away from this page.
Press OK to continue, or Cancel to stay on the current page.
[OK] [Cancel]

Currently, there is only a ‘Filter’ button for the ‘View all categories’ and I would like filters for each column under the Manage>Posts section (i.e. Author, Tags and Status). This helps to find those posts without the ‘tags’ instead of having to click ‘Next’ for each of my 83 pages (of 15 items per pages).

Furthermore, the ‘Page order’ under Managed>Published section (i.e. Title) is sorted alphabetically incorrectly and is not sorted by ‘Page order’ prior to this ‘New Dashboard Design’ today. I sent my general feedback under the ‘Support’ section to my new dashboard but had a hard time figuring out which categories to select for a general comment or feedback in the form of a question.

Copyright © 2008 by Fluffy von der Flynn. All rights reserved.

I’ve done another theme via WordPress.com: This time is ‘Contempt’ by Michael Heilemann. I guess I got bored with the purple background color and opted for the basic white (#FFF) instead. This looks more presentable and cleaner at first glance with gray, purple and some blue without all the different colors floating all over the place from my previous theme ‘Pool’ by Borja Fernandez.

Among the ‘free’ themes available under WordPress.com, ‘Contempt’ for me is by far the easiest to modify with my paid CSS upgrade. It took me only three hours to perfect the layout of mostly borders, fonts, colors and images since we don’t have access to modify the elements.

As usual, I prefer the one column monster at width of 750px (or pixels). This means most of the reading should be done towards the top the browser without the mostly default sidebars located on either side to distract the reading from the content, entry, page, container, wrapper, etc… sections.

Further, I set the font size for the content entries at 1.5em with the ‘titles’ at 2em to accommodate the more myopic individuals. The sidebars, which should be called bottombar for the one column themes, have smaller fonts than prior attempts at trying to make the larger fonts of the post entries match with the fonts in the sidebars.

For a couple of days again, I tried out different themes, including ‘Rounded’ by Ghyslain Armand. This particular theme had rounded corners and colors of brown and lime green. It almost worked out but the navigation bar and its tabs on either side wouldn’t go away. I had a hard time with reducing the size of both the navigation bar and the header towards the topmost part of the browser.

It did have all the category, tag, edit, the date and time stamps for both the pages and posts, including full view for my categories, archives and pages. Unfortunately this current ‘Contempt’ theme lacks these nice date and time stamp features that I’ve been looking for in a theme, which had the navigation bar option at the top, as well as the ‘Tagline’ for my epitaph.

I am hoping this theme will be a keeper. But as expressed in my prior blogs, I’m never satisfied and out of perfection that could never be achieved with the limitation of a free account under WordPress.com. I looked into WordPress.org but I don’t know anything about PHP or SQL and all that jazz. So I’ll stick to the easy stuff here for now.

Copyright © 2008 by Fluffy von der Flynn. All rights reserved.