Well, I’ve been testing all of the default WordPress.com themes and still cannot make up my mind. The defaults are not perfect to my liking but I’ll have to make that work because I’m no expert in editing CSS. I won’t be renewing my ‘annual subscription’ to mess around with CSS anymore. It’s a pain and really only meant for the gurus in this area.
So for most of the day, all I did was clicked, previewed, activated and cycled the free themes all over again until the following morning. The current time is 01:23AM and I’m going to have to make this particular blog quick so I could get some much needed sleep. Sleep is nothing compared to being awake and actually excited in a frustrated way.
The previous theme I’ve had for over two months got boring and the font size was too small. Plus, there were a few other items I wanted but couldn’t find the right combination.
First, I wanted a custom header that would ‘stretch out’ automatically to fit the mostly ‘fixed width’ of the themes and not have to be cropped with the far right hand areas missing. Both the ‘Blog title’ and ‘Tagline’ should be included but found some themes didn’t have the option of including the ‘Tagline’.
Second, I wanted a navigation bar which is mostly located at the top of each screen. Some themes didn’t have this option and my ‘Pages’ looked too cluttered and were to large to manage as a ‘Widget’, which didn’t have an easier way of including ONLY ‘Parent Pages’.
As I clicked on several well known website for examples, I realized I could narrow down my original ‘Tabs’ modeled after a typical book format to something easier for the readers, like ‘About me’, ‘Contact’, ‘Contents’, ‘Help’ and ‘Site Map’. Of course, mine is not the best but at least I got the main stuff consolidated like a credit card under the ‘Contents’ tab.
I went to another website offering free web hosting and web tools in hopes of trying to include everything I want in a weblog. But I went bonkers after realizing how much effort is required to build the site that WordPress has easily provided with those nice ‘Widgets’! I love WordPress! And they are local in the Bay Area, which makes updating my stuff at this weblog much faster and, yeah, safer.
Third, I wanted larger fonts. This was narrowed down to my current theme, ‘Contempt’ and it describes my attitude soon in the court of law if justice is not served now!
Anyway, next I wanted the category and tags filed underneath the title to each of my blog, at least. But for some themes, I had to click on each title to get more information, especially the date and time stamps I published each post entry. And I wanted to make sure that my ‘copyright’ information was located somewhere towards the bottom of each viewable page, too. But the ‘sidebars’ only go as far as not only the number of post viewed per page but the length of each post.
Lastly, I wanted ‘Widgets’! I discovered how versatile these little suckers are before I redid my ‘Pages’ logically to fit the navigation bar (without the last tab page disappearing off the right side or staggering unevenly above and below). Now I have four of the total nine ‘Text Widgets’ remaining to modify, drag into the sidebar and save the changes.
I’ll need to decide what other goodies (or animations) I could program into these widgets. All I’m using right now are those smiling faces and those are fun for now. Unfortunately, I couldn’t program a java scripts or an ‘iframe’ as text because WordPress doesn’t allow nice amenities, like free world clocks, to be updated for our web site.
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