Ack! I’ve outdone myself again. For the past two days, I played around with the free themes via WordPress.com and decided to keep the ‘Quentin’ by Pike Murdy. It’s ‘a rustic, older feeling and dignified two-column theme of two columns, fixed width and brown color, which blends nicely with Gustave Dore’s illustration for ‘The Divine Comedy, Paradisio, Canto 28′. The photo credit belongs to Wikepedia.org, by the way. I’ve set a hyperlink to the ‘Front Cover’. So hopefully this ‘fixes’ my ‘web-book’ and people could turn the pages with the ‘right arrows’ located just above my ‘copyright’ information for each turn of the page.
What I really like about the ‘Quentin’ theme are the large fonts from the ‘Georgia’ family. The more myopic readers would appreciate words that scream out from the black color (#000000) against the yellow, brown background. Eventually, I found that the white color (#FFFFFF) of the background was too bright and hurt my eyes. Even the pale letters against the light brown background of the ‘Treba’ theme by Phy strained my stained my eyes as the small font made reading almost impossible through my thick eyeglasses.
Without my paid CSS upgrade, I thought I was going to keep ‘Treba’ but decided to work with ‘Quentin’ and force the layout I wanted. My goal was to wean myself from the top navigation bar and I discovered the versatility of the ‘text widget’ for the sidebar. But I still wasn’t happy with the fact that sidebars ‘crowded’ out my main ‘contents’. So I played around with the ‘width’ again and came up with ‘730px’ for the ‘content’. The bottom scrollbar disappeared as a result! I was on my way to make this puppy perfect.
By setting the ‘borders’ to 3px temporarily, I studied how the codes affected the layout of this theme. And, lo and behold, I stretched the width of the sidebar (or ‘menu’ code) and knew I was on to something. I then went back to the Design > Widgets and removed everything, leaving one ‘text widget’ and the ‘search widget’, which I later placed on top. I didn’t like how the other widgets were stacked up on top of each other vertically. I wanted to maintain the horizontal look of the ‘sidebar’ and found that the two remaining ‘widgets’ work nicely way on the bottom.
Also towards the bottom of each post, the reader would have to click ‘Older Entries’ and ‘Newer Entries’ located on the left and on the right, respectively, after each post. This was due to setting the display to one post instead of the original ten posts per page via Settings > Reading > Blog. My desire was avoid scrolling up and down and all around just to read one blog entry after the other. I opted make my readers work hard to learn anything. I know I’m mean. But that’s me in a nice nutshell of one blogger’s addiction to perfecting the ideal website.
The next monster was dealing with the many pages. I’ve read a little hint from the ‘WM’ feed of ‘Shrimpsei’ about ‘losing the contents’. My mind assumed by reading between the lines and too much for my own good. But this was a good thing because I realize that the ‘Table of Contents’ was too large. I then read more hints via the WordPress.com forum about using the <! -nextpage- > feature to my advantage. I spent the whole day reworking ALL my pages, including ‘Front matter’, ‘Chapters’ and ‘Back matter’. Then I deleted the redundant pages, which noone seems to read anyway.
Then I made use of the caption feature for the images and learned how to use <a title=> and ‘alt’ to provide descriptions as the pointer from the mouse hovers over the image. This saves the writer time and reduces the lines entered into the body of the post entries. I also saw how the ‘EY’ site of ‘Ken’ made use of the captions for each photo showing SS folks. I didn’t know that Hitler still lived despite the stories of his apparent suicide after his loss to the WWII.
The war now is with me. Besides the many scam-filled, failures by those defrauding, puss-heads, who are banksters ‘connected…in the “network,” for over eight slong years, I found peace with my newest look to ‘Flynn’s Blogs’, which should be renamed ‘Flynn’s Paws’. So rightfully so does the claws of my kitty cat that must scratch out the eyes of those who do not read my blogs, which contain many leads and hints about the world and people from politics to religion.
Anyway, I liked the new ‘Tabular Stats’ feature to members of WordPress.com. I have yet to make sense of all the numbers. All I know is that the stat for the ‘Top Posts & Pages’ is off because each time I log off, there seems to be an increase to the ‘Home’ page by one count when I log back into my site a few minutes later. I don’t know what else to do with this ‘Summary Table’, which is located towards the bottom of the Dashboard > Blog Stats and in between the ‘Blog Stats’ to the left and ‘Incoming Links’ to the right.
Right now, I’ve better stop this addiction to blogging and watch the remaining events to the Summer Olympics 2008 in Beijing, China via cable programming; since I don’t smoke and drink (but eat heartily that I’ve gained back the pounds). So there you have my activities. I am hoping for newer themes here at WordPress.com but my new theme will have to do for now. There is nothing like a compromise between a blogger without much CSS knowledge and self-hosting site than here for ‘free’ at WordPress.com.
Copyright © 2008 by Fluffy von der Flynn. All rights reserved.