Building this Blog Site

Building the Blog Site

It was back to the list of fantastico LAMP software to see what was available for blogging. Again I was spoiled for choice; b2evolution, Nucleus, pMachine Free, and WordPress. Checking around the web WordPress seemed to be a very popular choice, so I installed it from the fantastico package. This was the easy part.

Lets start with some content

I tested a few of the themes loaded with the software. But I realised that the posts I’d be making would be more than a single paragraph “hello world” type post. I knew my posts would cover multiple days and I really wanted to use different heading levels to break up my lengthy posts (my boss always complains that I’m too verbose). I also planned to add photos to tie the post to the relevant photo album.

So I started penning the Labour Day Trip to South Western Vic blog entry. This gave me a few pages and HTML headings.

Getting the look right – playing with themes

We really are spoiled for choice when it comes to themes for WordPress. Not only are there thousands of themes to gorge yourself on, there are also different layouts and other options to choose when deciding on a theme. There is the official WordPress Themes site plus hundreds of others.

I wanted a fairly simple theme, not too cluttered, subtle not “RA!” and capable of being viewed on a variety of systems (i.e. good in FF and IE, ok on an 800×600 display). I decided on a two column layout which narrowed down the selection on the WordPress Themes site to just over 1100! So I started strolling through them and downloading the ones that looked nice. I’d upload a dozen or so at a time to my site, view each of them with my content, discard all but the ones I liked, and repeat the process. I ended up with half a dozen I liked:

• Autumn Concept
• Beautiful Day
• Ephemeral
• Green Track
• Landzilla and Landzilla-From the Swamp
• Ocean Mist
• Tranquility and Tranquility White

Some of these appealed with the overall look and feel, some had features I liked and some had fonts I liked. I picked one and left the rest sitting in the Themes selector so I could quickly switch.

Why don’t I see more pages

There were a few layout inconsistencies that I weren’t happy with. It had taken some time to discover the nextpage tag (a button on the edit screen beside the more button would be nice), but even after doing that I found that some themes did not include the “Page 1 2 ..” text at the bottom and some didn’t seem to recognise the nextpage tag at all (you could only see the first page and there was no way to get to subsequent pages). I had a look at the PHP code to figure out why they were different but had no success. In the end it gave me another reason to filter out themes.

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