Ending the vigil, letting in the light
Someone call the Child Support Agency!
I'm too technically incompetent, too anxious and too lazy to attempt major changes but I've just switched from Vigilance to another Kabitzin-approved theme, LightWord. It all started out so innocently too.
My initial main objectives were to install the Better Blogroll plugin and shift the main blogroll to a separate single page, a project that had been on the back of my mind since reading Orion's post and thinking, well, better safe than sorry. That went smoothly.
The second objective was to install the Get Recent Comments plugin since I found the output of the native Recent Comments widget fugly and thought it was dumb how it highlighted internal trackbacks. And I liked what I saw on Sea Slugs! But for some reason, it refused to work in Vigilance unless Recent Comments was also enabled. Go figure. I thought maybe it was because I was using an old version of the theme and duly upgraded to 1.42 - which was unable to load all the customizations in my child theme. The fault may lie with me but I'm still upset anyway. And if I was going to redo all the customizations, I might as well try another theme where GRC would actually work (it didn't on Vig 1.42).
So here it is. [Add: No more lack of previous and next post links in single post view.] There were some Doh! moments over what turned out to be non-problems - such as the default narrowness of the main column (hey presto - wider!), finding out the page id (just hover the mouse pointer over the link to specific page under the main Page menu) as well as being unable to insert Google Search as a text widget (just fill in the necessary under Appearance > LightWord Setttings > 'Google Custom Search Engine'); there are still some teething problems such as lack of rotating banner option, archives page not up yet (what's a good plugin?) but I'm relieved that at least most of the useful functions are up and running.
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October 14th, 2009 - 21:49
For a moment I thought I had clicked on the wrong link. I’m so used to seeing PINK when coming to hontouni, seeing grey is kinda weird. I like the layout though, feels very efficient.
October 14th, 2009 - 23:06
Haha, I’m a bit disorientated too. Well, there’ll still be pink in the screencap borders!
October 15th, 2009 - 02:05
You can change the background to pink, and update the header, like what Shinn has done, and a few of the wordpress forum threads have tips on Lightword. I haven’t tried it myself because I’m usually lazy about customizing my personal blog’s theme, but it shouldn’t be too hard. I’m not immediately sure how to enable the rotating header, though.
October 15th, 2009 - 08:58
Thanks for the links to the WP Forum and for reminding me that Shinn is also using Lightword. I tend to work better when I have something tangible to reverse engineer.
October 15th, 2009 - 08:15
I like the new layout. The Lightword theme is just nice and clean. Really good for readability and scanning. Like Nazarielle mentioned, I definitely do hope the pink makes a comeback. It’d go well with a Hina banner *cough cough*
October 15th, 2009 - 09:02
LOL I’m surprised that people actually want the pink back. Stockholm Syndrome?
I had already taken down my Signum-neesan, Hina and Mawari banners before the theme change – kind of inspired by Hinano’s outburst and Kabitzin’s introduction of Namako. Didn’t have any qualms about using the Lunamaria banner because Kabitzin had given me permission to use his fanart and I had paid a dollop of cash for the T2 LUNAR! doujin which moyism had merged with Kabitzin’s art to make that banner. Likewise Stripey has done more than his fair share to support Tinkle with multiple artbook purchases so the Byakuya cover banner stayed. I’ll try to reinstate them somehow.
October 15th, 2009 - 10:10
PINK~
Hey there’s nothing wrong with pink, gives the site some flavor
October 16th, 2009 - 01:15
Hurray, the pink is back! Pink = Hontouni (IMO). For archives, i like the clean archives plugin. i think it’s the cleanest and most reader-friendly archive plugin. Although I’d love to know if u find something better.
October 16th, 2009 - 22:50
RP, Clean Archives couldn’t work for me: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of XYZ bytes exhausted (tried to allocate ABC bytes) – thanks for the suggestion anyway.
October 16th, 2009 - 11:54
You sure picked the right time to change themes, since I had to actually expand the width on my own… Might want do add a 1px stroke to the blog title and description, since it’s hard to see against the pink background, but that could just be me :9
October 16th, 2009 - 14:27
Actually it was Vigilance that decided it for me by not having the child theme work after upgrade. >_<
I’ve added 1px (CCCCCC over the CC6699 background) stroke and it is so much more legible. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
October 17th, 2009 - 13:34
By the way I’m using Clean Archives Reloaded, so you might want to give that a shot. Also, if you figured out how to implement the rotating banner, let me know!
October 17th, 2009 - 17:09
Sigh, I can’t seem to get CAR to work. Probably too many entries (1,800+) relative to the maximum memory usage under my current hosting plan.
I’ve also given up on rotating banners so I’ve made a new combined banner instead. It looked too complicated because normally you can just use a standard rotate.php file but there isn’t a separate sub-dir just for banners to drop it in. Hard-coding it is waaay too difficult for me.
October 27th, 2009 - 15:30
Update on Clean Archives Reloaded – huzzah! Ver 3.1.10 works!!
October 28th, 2009 - 23:22
Just in case clicking on those numbers under Recent Comments on the right is supposed to do something, thought I’d let you know that it doesn’t.