Screaming Monkey Research Laboratories

Got tired of the UNC Blue theme.

This might be a first. I’m loading up this theme pretty much unchanged. (Some minor sidebar work.) Very clean.

It is pretty darn slow. Seems to have a huge stylesheet.

WordPress has gotten really easy to work with. It can download and install updates without (much) human intervention. It can do the same with plugins. Now it has added a neat theme downloader. Search for themes and let it download them. Nice.

I like this theme but I definitely need to redo the colors.

I’ve got to say that the new admin tools in WordPress 2.7 are much nicer.  They were getting better last build but this new one makes the admin dashboard actually usable.  Nice.

Most of the stuff has been posted here but it is easier to look through at flickr. I need a better badge template. I’d like a small one to use as a signature and a big one for my gallery page. Time to google.

www.flickr.com Go to SMR Labs’ photostream

This one is pretty much as downloaded. I will be replacing the cherry blossom graphic once I come up with a suitable replacement.

Otherwise I love the style.

Edit: I think the screaming monkey should work fine as a graphic.

Apparently it took 1 day to get bored of the other theme.

Some interesting style sheet tricks in this one to clear space. It gives the post section 100% of the page area and then uses a negative margin to clear out space for the sidebar. It compensates for this by using an equal amount of padding on the post area to move it out of the negative margin.

It also has a container class big enough to hold my posts plus sidebar. If your browser is not wide enough you’re going to get a scrollbar rather than the old sidebar next to the content or under the content. Seems obvious to wrap everything in a defined div but I hadn’t seen it and didn’t know to do it.

It is all very interesting. Never thought of it and that would have fixed more than a few templates I’ve tried to build. (Fluid width templates are a harsh mistress.)

Might go back to the minimalist template at some time. It is just a bit too minimalist for me. Was going to add some bling. Instead I got this one running. Removed some of its bling. Shrunk down the borders (a key component to photoblogization of a theme) and sized everything just so for my images.

I’m not sure I’m going to keep this one. I really like the one I had. But it is time for a change so we go with this one. I dismissed this template the first time I saw it. It had orange text which made it difficult to determine if it was any good. But 1 minute in Top Style Lite fixed that.

Pretty minimal. See how long it takes me to get bored with it.

If you need to debug web layouts and style sheets firebug is the way to go. It is a free add on for firefox that lets you do all kinds of nifty things. Helped me fix the header on this site under IE7.

Recommended.

Just a test post to work on this template. …

Just posting an image to see how it fits.

So far so good. Need to add the recent comments thing and a couple of other things. There is a style sheet issue that causes the blog title to get cut off with IE7. I have no intention of making sure this works with earlier versions of internet explorer. Upgrade or get firefox.

It will take me a couple days to get things setup and then I’ll have to turn the DNS crank. That should take another couple of days. After that we should be moved.