Virginia Is For Families

As you can probably tell I have a problem with chronic theme replacement.  Maybe you have been reading something here and you clicked on another page only to find yourself in the middle of a different theme.

I hope that hasn’t happened to anybody who is a regular reader.   If someone just comes  by for a ten second visit it really is not an issue.  But I do try to make things nice for anyone who comes back for visits.

So I apologize.  Part of the problem is that over the past year I posted too many large photos.  And now I have to go back and downsize them all.  Because there just are not that many themes that are really nice AND hold photos that are 640 pixels wide.

Also when I need to fix a theme for one reason or another I often cannot do the fix.  So I have to find another theme.

Anyway I would like to say that this theme is very nice and I am hopeful it will be around a long time.  It is called the Mountain Theme and it is by Sadish.  The font is beautiful and very readable.  I like the blue very much.  And the header will hold anything I can fit into it.  It has a contact page, an archive page and a link page included.

Most importantly it hides photos that have not yet been fixed and does not splash them all over the sidebar.  I like the idea of having the sidebar on the left because we read from left to right in the west.

And I hope the little lines under the photos are going to disappear soon.  They are already gone in older posts.  It’s an ongoing conflict between the shadow image plugin and the photos.  This was solved very nicely by the author of the Layers Theme that I use on my other three blogs.  I hope that Sadish will fix it too although I wrote to him about it and he has not responded.

I really like the Layers Theme but it is better for blogs that are primarily photo oriented in my opinion.  Although there are plenty of photos here I feel like this blog is devoted primarily to words.  And the font is now truly beautiful and much nicer than it was on the Blix theme.

So that’s why I changed again.  Hope everyone understands my issues.  Blogging is such a challenging and fun  hobby.

UPDATE//  I give up.  Sadish has a very similar theme called Sky Blue.  And it allows wider photos so I don’t have to have a cropathon.  The sidebar is on the right but that’s not as important as saving hours slicing and dicing photos.  What can I say?  Sorry?  I will bring it up in therapy?  I promise not to change it again until next year?

That last one is just a question.  It’s not a promise.

Good Evening. My name is David and I am a Themaholic. I can’t turn down a theme. It speaks to me and I surrender.

It doesn’t matter that I have pledged my allegiance to Sadish and his wonderful templates. Nothing matters except getting the next theme fix.

I keep telling myself “This time it will be different”.

Maybe it will. Or maybe I will wake up tomorrow morning full of regret and guilt because I traded Sadish and his great theme in for THIS.

But I don’t think so and besides the night is still young.

There’s lots of time left to install more plugins and see how they work. I don’t want to think about tomorrow.

When it’s still tonight.

Do you change themes very often?  Do you feel that people who change themes often are hampering their blogging efforts?

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I have tried a lot of different themes on my three Wordpress.org blogs. And I always seem to return to Sadish and his fine themes. They don’t cause me problems and they do some pretty cool things. Virginia Breeze uses his Nigarila theme and as you can see it allows me to show a slideshow in the all important upper right area of the front page. I can also put 1-4 posts up there and give them great visibility. There is also a page of options with this theme and a great deal of versatility in the admin/design area.

I am not sure exactly what you would call the photo presentation. Maybe it is an overlay? I went looking for some clues about this and found this article. The title is The Lightbox Clones Matrix and as you can see there are a lot of different options and descriptions in this area.

http://planetozh.com/projects/lightbox-clones/

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I was very happy to see his Wordpress.com theme Misty Look come to the Wordpress.org side of the street. I am not sure when that happened but I can remember asking Sadish to do something like this when I purchased Nigarila. I was using Sky Blue at the time for my third theme on the news/politics/humor blog NewsLink Briefs. And really wanted the “light box” for PhotoLink Love. The photos there clearly benefit from this presentation.

And so now he has done it. And Misty Look is free! Sky Blue is also free although it was around twenty dollars when I bought it. Nigarila was also about that much. He is always giving great themes away or charging very nominal prices for his work.

And he has many more themes. But these stand out in my mind as the best of his work.

One more thing I should not forget to mention is the ability to import a photo into the header of all these blogs. When I get restless and start thinking about making a change I find this is a very good way to avoid making too much of a change and getting into trouble. My recent experience with the photoblog plugin is a good example of what can happen in that regard. I have many 404 messages now because of it and have learned a valuable lesson.

There is only one wish left on my list of things I would like to see Sadish create. And it is something that I have not ever seen out there in the land of themes. He does not like to repeat himself so maybe he will do it sometime.

Take something like the striking header and font from Sky Blue. Add the author’s box from Nigarila. Use something a little like the side bar in Misty Look. Allow photos up to 650 pixels wide like those in the Sky Blue theme. And add the photo treatment found in Misty Look and Nigarila.

I can imagine one of those large photos overlaying a beautiful page and it would be stunning. It would be unique! It would be so fabulous he might even want to charge twenty five dollars for it!

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http://wprocks.com/free-themes/

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http://wprocks.com/

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http://wpthemeshop.com/

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Update:  I am trying out a new theme by Sadish at NewsLink Briefs in case you go looking there for Sky Blue.

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Th’ first thing to have in a libry is a shelf. Fr’m time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure. But th’ shelf is th’ main thing. ~Finley Peter Dunne

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Sometimes you just have to become motivated and make things happen. And around here that means cleaning my room. All the book shelves reach a point where they are stuffed full of papers, folders, gloves, hats, computer cords, old newspapers, empty software boxes, notebooks, towels, a bottle of Murphy Wood Cleaner, tape measures, a box of screws and assorted other stuff. Cleaning stuff up. These are “the days of our lives”.

Basically there are just supposed to be books in there and they should be in a vertical position instead of sideways on top of other books. So I cleaned that up and nearly gave myself some sort of dust disease by stirring up a half inch of wispy particles that fall all over the place like snow over a period of time.

And this room is very warm after about March so I bought a small AC unit and installed it in the second floor window next to the book shelves without dropping it out the window. Beth was sure that was going to happen and kept Sparky and Malarky our sharp toothed German Shepherds in the house while I was doing this.

They enjoyed themselves watching me from the other side of the room and occasionally growling in my direction. They probably think that I am afraid of them but the jokes on them because I know they are harmless as long as they are well fed . So I feed them four or five hours early when they start with the tough dog act.

Boy are they dumb.

I also bought a small digital tape recorder so I won’t forget these great blogging ideas I have while I am driving around. There’s hardly any chance I will remember them otherwise. I am just happy that when I went to the store to buy the AC unit I remembered to buy a digital tape recorder too.

But then I lost it. So after going through all the trash and all the boxes in the room I happened to look in one of the book shelves above the books.

And low and behold there it was and still in its little package too! Losing something before it is even opened would have really been a bummer.

The other thing I did was make a decision about my photoblog PhotoLink Love dot com. The photoblog plugin didn’t work out as you probably noticed if you went over there. The Yet Another Photoblog Plugin just quit working. So then I decided to use one of Sadish’s themes and make some of the photos 650 pixels across.

Because big photos are enjoyable. I think. Nobody has ever told me otherwise. Maybe everyone is humoring me.

Whatever. But then I found another theme by Sadish that has the light box capacity. Virginia Breeze has this and it’s very nice ( I am not sure if these are officially called light boxes or not). But you can’t have both as far as I know. Big photos vs. light box. Hmmm.

Such difficult decisions. So I have decided on smaller photos and the light box. And I had to redo a lot of photos to make them 500 pixels across. So I did it so many times it started taking about thirty seconds per post (And I still need to fix the ugly little line that you see under some of the photos).

And finally I hired someone to fix the code that has not really worked well since the time my domain stopped working completely last fall. For about a month I was forced to post on my Wordpress.com blog and nobody could fix the .org blog!

What a helpless feeling that was! But then it started working again one day on its own. But it still does screwy things and has been especially screwed up since Wordpress 2.5 came out. Someday they will figure all this stuff out and our grandchildren won’t have these problems. Blogs will work fine all the time and we will have time to worry about other stuff.

This will probably happen some time after I depart this vale of tears and frustration however.

But at least the vale isn’t hot anymore. This AC unit is putting out some serious cold air.