Pleasant simplicity is the value of Vigilance
All blog-tech roads lead to Kabitzin. At least where the Houtou ni blogs are concerned. I started using K2 because that's what Sea Slugs! was on. But I didn't dare to tread into Sandbox, mostly because I still have trouble remembering what CCS CSS stands for, much less know how to use it.
Kabitzin's personal blog has been on Vigilance for a while. And I recently saw a plug for it on Wordpress.com so I took it out on a test drive and liked what I experienced. It was easy to customize (font colours, top rotating banners, widgets, tweaks to php for various plugins); I've also been smitten by the combo of wide/left/right sidebars. And while not the prettiest theme, it's pleasant enough to look at day after day.
Ben Graham told Warren Buffett that: 'Price is what you pay; value is what you get.' In terms of time, effort and hairs not ripped out of my already severally depleted scalp, Vigilance - the third theme to be instated since the Beginning - has certainly delivered in spades.
Addendum: Hmmm... favicon wasn't showing up. Commented off the default favicon code in the header.php and solved it by inserting the following:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://blahblahblah/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /><link rel="icon" href="http://blahblahblah/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
Related posts:
- Vigilante action for Vigilance
- Ending the vigil, letting in the light
- Embracing Google Search's tentacles
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March 2nd, 2009 - 19:43
The K2 theme does get boring after a while. I’m still running a rather outdated version and can’t even upgrade to the newer version of both K2 and WP due to some massive changes I did. Still, just a bit more tweaking and you’ll get the colour scheme right.
March 2nd, 2009 - 22:49
Themes like Sandbox (now probably dead) and Thematic are awesome if you have a lot of hours to spare doing CSS coding.
I like the trend of more themes coming with an admin page in the dashboard. Not everyone always wants to muck around in CSS. On the personal blog, I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time coding and making sure spacing and coloring looks right, and Vigilance has a lot of customizable parts right out of the box.
As for K2, I think it is a good theme if you like it as is. Unfortunately, I recall it was a horrible pain to customize, since changing any part really broke just about everything.
I like where the redesign is going, and I think once all the colors match up it will be smooth as
Lunamaria’s bottomthe armor on a Zaku.March 2nd, 2009 - 23:09
It’d be great if we had one-click upgrades for themes too. I’m always worried about how new WP versions might break themes which is one reason why I’ve stuck with K2 since it was well-supported with regular nightly builds.
But, as Kabitzin said, I had a difficult time tweaking it. I think I broke the search function long ago (separate words got joined together) and never managed to get it working properly again. Also the AJAX fought with some of my plugins. Had problems with Archives too…
Design’s never been my strong point. Any suggestions on the colour scheme? I’ve currently got FFCCCC for the background and link hover, CC00FF for border and link color.
March 3rd, 2009 - 05:50
I like the new theme, seems like alot people are changing their themes right now (myself included.)
I was so happy when wordpress.com added this theme, even though it’s slightly stripped down for wordpress.com users (I wanted the rotating banner feature), to me it’s the best theme that they’ve offered. The one feature I really liked was the combination of the wide sidebar and two thinner side bars allows me to have a much wider post area and still put everything I want in the sidebars.
March 2nd, 2009 - 23:51
The trend in themes has also been towards child themes (loli themes?!), so that when you upgrade the parent, all your modifications remain. Vigilance supports child themes, so you would upload the child theme folder with your customized CSS. This lets you make changes you can’t make in the admin area.
Here’s what you do: upload a folder to your wp-content/themes folder called “myvigilance”. This folder will have 2-3 files. myvigilance will have a file called “screenshot.png” that you can upload. This will be what you see in the WP Appearance screen to let you select the child theme. myvigilance will also have a “style.css file”. I know code pasting can get wonky, so I’ve pasted the coder at UtilityBase for you to start with. You can also add a file called functions.php if you want, but I checked and mine just says <?php //Insert your custom functions here ?>.
The explanation of the customizations in the css file I linked:
1) I changed the way blockquotes appear, and how blockquotes in the posts specifically appear. You can delete the first two blocks of code if you like how the default blockquotes look.
2) I pasted in the default CSS for changing the background color of comments by the blog author. You can change the RGB value to something that matches your theme instead of that sorta dusty green.
3) I changed how the quicktags appear (default quicktag css code).
If you are unsure about why something looks the way it does, you can check the parent CSS in vigilance/css/master.css to get an idea. With these changes, you can upgrade Vigilance in the future, and your modifications will be preserved.
March 3rd, 2009 - 00:15
Here is a quick mockup, using web-safe colors, since that looks like what you were doing with your other choices. It looks a bit more purple than pink, but matches your lines a bit better.
March 3rd, 2009 - 09:21
Thanks so much, Kabitzin! YOU ARE AWESOME!!