I’m working on my own WordPress theme!
Here’s the concept:
New WordPress Theme
It’s not in the WordPress stages yet — this is still the barebones. I’m thinking about using the very sandboxy WP theme Sandbox as it’s framework. I’ve used Sandbox before as a theme and I can’t say enough good things about it.
I just don’t like the new direction WP themes are taking. The “premium” look, as I call it, is just too much. I want to go back to the days of basic two-or-three column layouts, without the big square buttons on the sidebar or the magazine-like “featured” sections. I mean, for someone who keeps a personal blog, all of that isn’t for me. I’d prefer the simplicity and minimalism of yesteryear….*wistful*
I can’t say that I’m having the best of luck with SweetCron. There are problems abroad. If you go to my personal site, you’ll see that I have a decent skin (one that looks like my Soup.io page), but I’m completely screwed when it comes to the php. In short, I don’t know what I don’t know.
I have two problems with SweetCron so far. First, it doesn’t support most of the site feeds that I want to include. Yeah, it has the standard Twitter and YouTube support, but not much else. It doesn’t support my Tumblr feed. Hell, it doesn’t even support Delicious! What the hell?!
Second, I have to go in and manually edit php code to add Delicious, Tumblr, etc. support. Though I wanted to learn a bit of code while working with SweetCron, my code didn’t do ANYTHING different. I still have a plain old ugly box with “SweetCron doesnt’ recognize this feed” blah blah blah. Why not? Soup.io does.
I’m begining to think that the word “beta” is a cop-out for errors in code or software that is lacking somewhat. “Oh, it’s ok that we have errors — we’re in beta” seems to be the mantra these days. I think softwares stays in beta for as long as it can because it is safer and they can avoid criticism.
Ugh. I didn’t mean for that to be a tirade. I’m just really frustrated right now. I’m also on the look out for another open source lifestream. Any out there?
I can’t stress enough the importance of redirects. Rather than force your readers to click on a link to go to your new website or blog, you should opt for a redirect whenever possible. My hosting company, Dreamhost, offers easy ways to redirect to other pages simply by configuring the domain. f your own host doesn’t have this ability, there are plenty of PHP and Javascripts out there to help out.
Here’s my favorite: it’s a single line of PHP code. You don’t have to know PHP or anything in order to use it:
<?php
header( ‘Location: http://yournewblog.com/’ ) ;
?>
That’s it! Copy-and-past this little bit of code into the page you want redirect to another site. Don’t forget to change the dummy text (unless you own YourNewBlog.com) and save your page with a .php extension. Automatically, your incoming traffic will redirect from your old page to your new page.
