Okay, the new template is set up more or less how I want it… the center column is about 25px too narrow to accomodate the larger images I’ve favored recently, the sidebars will have to be moved farther to the sides to allow for this, and the font is pretty small and needs to be a bit larger.

But I’m happy with the result for now.

The funny thing about WordPress’s much vaunted flexibility and “one click template change” setup is it’s a bit techy getting the new templates downloaded into the right directory to begin with, and each template designer does things in different ways. I’m used to getting in up to my elbows in template tags (especially when I was still using Movable Type and created the original church website with a static front page). I’ve got a stable of WP themes now, a few of which have been customized enough that their own designers wouldn’t recognize them other than by their architectural “bone structure,”  and the fact that I leave the original designer’s links in the footers.

And then the real techy stuff starts, because you never know just where in a template some element may be stated or called from. Case in point, the two Talians: the body tags and associated DIVs start out in the header file, but aren’t closed until the footer file. To change the stock image, a forest view, I found that it was a background image that was called with a DIV ID called “put-image-here.” And I had to edit this in… 3 or 4 different files. I didn’t want to stop and figure out how to do a PHP iinclude again, as I did to accomplish a similar feat in an old MT blog.

But I now have a horizontal strip of my Flickr photos (some of which David actually too, but I needed on my account for other purposes) as the header image, which is actually stuck at the top of the content column. I had a merry time of it getting the Flickr CSS to make nice with the default color scheme (which I like). Had to increase the height of the “put-image-here” DIV ID too. And commented out the default background image.

Not going to mess with the other version of Talian for now, I’m sticking to center-content. I have to mess with the Meta widget thing to get it to show the Feedburner feed instead of the standard one, I don’t understand why my installation still show that. Don’t really want to mess with that as David had a hell of a time with it when I first switched to WordPress.

So now, back to reading the news and keeping an eye out for quirky stuff. I expect to go back to work tomorrow.

Now listening:
♫ Pink Martini:Tempo Perdido: Hey Eugene!

Now listening:
♫ :KUNC: