Martin at Legal Scribbles has expressed his disapproval of Geeklawyer’s continued use of the ‘Kubrick’ visual them for this site. Geeklawyer doesn’t share his passionate, even, dare he say it, irrational dislike for it to anything like the same extent.
However it does need tarting up. And since fate has landed this blog in a moment of chaos it is as well to ride it to advantage. As a part of that process therefore various themes will be tried over the next few weeks and so do not be surprised, nor whinge, if thing visually break.
The one thing that has always left Geeklawyer unimpressed with Wordpress is the degree to which ‘themes’ encompass not merely visuals but the underlying code of the site. When one thinks of themes one normally imagines just visual changes and in many user interfaces this is so. In Wordpress a theme also encompasses functionality and in Geeklawyer’s view that is ugly software design since it entangles matters that should properly be left apart.
update 18th March 2007: You see? this is what Geeklawyer means. He picks a shiny new theme to try out and all his customisations fall off because they only applied to the default Kubrick theme. Now he has to spend X hours buggering around hacking someone’s template adding adsense & other plugin bits. Grrr. This is why he wants to hack his own CM system though so it can be done right from the outset …
Dammit. This is Sunday he should be in church praising damned Jesus. Or at least down the pub, oh, of course he can’t do that either if he’s going to keep the harridan off his back.
I agree about the annoying connection between the theme code and the functionality of the site itself.
There is, however, a way to bypass the problem: the Sandbox “theme”. See http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/ . The theme, once installed, acts as the exo-skeleton for all of the CSS skins that one can apply to it. In other words, you can tinker with the visual aspect of the site to your heart’s content without messing with any of the html, etc.
Legal Scribbles uses it. With a simple copy and paste I could use Kubrick’s CSS, but not have to worry about the semantic markup of the theme itself changing.
Oh, and it’s not an irrational hatred of Kubrick. Liking it would be akin to liking Ford Escorts. One has just seen too many of them, and formed an opinion about the people that tend to drive them, to like it anymore.
Wow!! well done on digging sandbox out. I shall try playing with this first …
I hope to do something with Sandbox — that looks like a good way to go but a this theme will remain in the interim (i.e. I’ll still be using it in 5 years!).
Looking though the Sandbox code I realised that my CSS skills were somewhat less than l33t & I need to sharpen up a lot on that before I can do theme design.
I would also suggest installing WP in a test sub domain (test123.geeklawyer.org) so you can fiddle with the look of the site away from prying eyes, before implementing it over here.
As for a Sandbox CSS skin, I think you would quite suit Bus Full of Hippies: http://www.archgfx.net/blog/index.php/2007/geek/blogging/bus-full-of-hippies-for-wordpress
Something for you and Ruthie…
Yeah, quite like that. Although I was thinking that a picture of fluffy kittens would be good for the home page.
Lets see if you can find the test site …
I would have a go, GL, but I can’t be arsed. If you want me to cast my [in]expert eye over it, or you want to talk about all things CSS, shoot me an email.
I’m not a fan of this look, however…
I agree Martin, its way too boring and business like.
Your feeds have been broken for quite some time now. If the URIs have changed you should drop in a 301 re-direct to the new ones.
Curious. I have permanent redirects in place. Everything from geeklawyer.org/blog should now point here. Which feed/s?
The URLs I’m subscribed to are these:
http://geeklawyer.org/blog/comments/feed/
http://geeklawyer.org/blog/wp-rss2.php
The comment feed just went live again (I think RSSOwl does update it’s URL in response to a 301 as it should), but the main feed is still dead.
It’d be lovely to have the form re-presented when you forget to type in the anti-spam sum too, but that’s a little thing.
He’s right; current subscribers to your RSS post feed are no longer getting updates. I presume that resubscribing from blog.geeklawyer.org will correct the problem.
Hmmm, not an acceptable solution. I’ll have to sort this out…
Just posted the feed links but they’ve not shown up. I guess that they’re held in moderation due to the URLs?
I’ve added these CPanel redirect:
“Current Redirects
/blog http://blog.geeklawyer.org (permanent)
/blog/ http://blog.geeklawyer.org (permanent)
/blog/comments/feed/ http://blog.geeklawyer.org/comments/feed/ (permanent)
/blog/feed/ http://blog.geeklawyer.org/feed/ (permanent)
/blog/wp-rss2.php http://blog.geeklawyer.org/wp-rss2.php (permanent)”
Not sure if the latter will redirect to a file rather than a directory, but since these get rewritten into Apache .htaccess rules I don’t see why not. I’ll see no doubt.
Thanks v much Kirit
I dont like this format at all. The colour scheme is ikky, and the green thing in the top right hand corner looks like something you’d find in a discarded petri dish.
Sadly I’m too busy at the moment to really get onto Geeklawyers case about it, but I did really like the Bus full of Hippies.
I think the consensus so far has been negative on this theme so I’ll find new themes to try. Trouble is they have to be hacked about to work on the site, so its a bit of effort.