The Four-eyed Journal » themes

Theme reboot – More WP 2.7 features and a little bit of old school

jhay — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 12:17:43 +0000

It’s so obvious by now that this blog has just taken another theme re-boot. The previous one, Blue Grace was a great theme but it was already giving me the feeling that everything is over-crowded.

So in line with welcoming the new year, I’ve decided to clean things up and start fresh. From shades of blue on white, it’s now spades of black on white, but little accents of blue because it is my favorite color. The Igloo theme by BizzArtic became my choice because it had a nice layout, clear and crsip typography, and offered neat features that make use the new ones brought on by WordPress 2.7

If you’ve come here via the front page, you’d think that this is a premium theme. It is, but it’s a free and open-source one. It had the features I’ve come to love from the previous premium themes used before here on the Four-eyed Journal. Experience however, had taught me to use only the features that I really use hence no featured videos on the sidebar are present and gone-still are the 125×125 square ads.

New blogging styles for 2009

The only main functionality that I’ve stuck with is the displaying of a featured post. There are two reasons for this choice; one - I plan on doing juicy posts once a week or two. It will be tutorials on getting things done via the internet or some cool free software, research-based, by research I mean extensively researched posts about technology, health, the internet and even politics, and posts that deserve a little more attention.

Second is that it allows me to be a little more personal about my regular posts, meaning starting January 2009, this blog will become my psuedo-personal blog on tech, the web, health and life (read as: politics, my advocacies, adventures and digs into history). This is the product of much soul-searching, self-awareness/assessment and revisiting my post Archives this past few days. (The wonders of having so much time for reflection and rest as afforded by long holidays are so rewarding.)

Clean, lean but meaningful

Glancing at the sidebar, a lot of the clutter has been removed. Only the juicy and relevant parts or contents of this blog have been retained. The stuff that are more useful to you my readers than to my self. Plus, the good ol’ blogroll is back. The final piece to be implemented is a lifestream aka aggregation of my Twits, Plurks, Del.ico.us bookmarks, and other content I create on the web.

The most visible feature and the one that you my readers would enjoy most would be the built-in support of this theme for the threaded/nested comments that is a new native feature of WordPress 2.7! Awesome is it not?

Another minor clean up would be the tweaked related posts after each article. It’s much more organized and meaningful thanks to the WordPress Related Posts plugin by Denis. It gives bloggers complete control on how to present more related content for readers.

There are still some minor tweaks I’m currently planning but for now, this is how this blog will look and behave like. With this, I’ve also decided to keep this theme for the most of 2009 and focus on giving more quality content and spending more time bloghopping.

I hope most of you will enjoy the theme re-boot, give me a shout-out for any bugs that you spot, and cheers to the coming new year!

Blog updates 3.08: theme reboot, roller-coaster ride & privacy policy

jhay — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:43:34 +0000

This past two weeks has been a roller-coaster ride for me. Even as the school year comes to an end, schoolwork has always kept me from blogging like I used to. Still, I have little to no regrets as the times I was able to blog were times put to very good use and noble causes. The previous posts on this blog is incontrovertible proof of it.

Anyways, let’s get on with this blog update post so as to clear things about the latest happenings to the this blog.

Theme reboot

Finally I achieved the Problogger.net look and feel! I may not be the problogger, but ever since Problogger.net had a major theme update, I could not help but say that the new design and layout was perfect. In my search and even purchase of WP themes, I’ve always used Problogger.net as a basis, looking for something similar to its layout and approach. Because it’s simply damn works!

First I tried on that WP_Premium theme by by R. Bhavesh and WP Remix. A day or so afterwards, I tried on the Forte theme by Moses Francis and stuck with it until this past weekend. That’s when you suddenly saw a new theme, based on the Copyblogger theme by Cris Pearson. I modified it a lot to achieve that ‘Problogger.net’ layout and feel. Plenty of space for the main content while keeping the essential elements close by.

I chose the Copyblogger theme because of it’s awesome and powerful typography. The image and blockquotes styles are simply elegant and beautiful. But I wanted to customize the theme even further, sadly though, my CSS skills are not yet up to the challenge so commissioned the help of Miko of Build that Geek, a promising and talented blogger/designer from Davao to bring to life what I had envisioned for my customization of the Copyblogger theme. Later on, I’ll probably release it to the public in case I do not, once more switch over to using it on this blog. So watch out for that everyone.

What’s really strange is I’m using another different theme right now and you’re wondering ‘what gives?’ Like what I said earlier, I’ve finally achieved the ‘Problogger.net’ layout and feel, all thanks to this awesome and powerful theme, Structure by Justin Tadlock. It’s awesome because of it’s looks and layout. I just tweaked the CSS to change the colors to taste, and very powerful because the theme can be customized without that many efforts or complications. Because 80% of the theme’s front page is widgetized allowing users to move around many blocks of content or uses to achieve their customized look and functionality.

Of almost all the ‘premium’ WP themes out there, Structure is among the best and it’s free! I’ll be talking more about how and why I customized this theme in the next coming days. For now, let’s move on.

My very own privacy policy

You may have known by now and you’ve probably complied with it by now, but I’ve finally posted by very own Privacy Policy as required by the recently updated Google AdSense TOS or Terms of Service. Yes, Google is now the true overlord of the web.

PinoyBlogero has a nice post about what the heck’s a ‘privacy policy’ is and how to make one so that you’d be in compliance with the new AdSense TOS. Honestly though, I used Jensense’s sample template to create with my own AdSense TOS-friendly Privacy Policy. The automatic Privacy Policy Generator was just too complicated for me to use. Jensense’s version is a lot easier to use and customize for each of our own blogs, we just copy it and fill-in the blanks with our blog’s name/url and other info and you’re all set.

That’s it for this blog update, if you have comments, questions or suggestions about the my theme please let me know via the comments thread below. For all you fellow bloggers who use AdSense, it’s time to update or create your very own ‘Privacy Policy.’

Check out mine!

The FEJ Theme Reboot

jhay — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:14:49 +0000

Surprise, surprise! It is obvious now that this blog now sports a new theme. What happened? Why? How? WTF? Relax, I’ll answer all those questions in this post.

Why change your theme – again

To be honest, I was encouraged by Jaypee’s own theme reboot to do a my own theme change. It’s not that I was just going along with the trend, my last conversation with Jaypee via Gtalk (he gave me a buzz prior to launching his new theme) just helped me realize to finally face a few issues that have propped up and bothering me ever since I switched into using ‘premium’ themes.

Everyone who has visited this blog knows that I purchased and now once used that awesome Premium News theme by Adii. Don’t get me wrong, I had no regrets of buying it for it was really a great, great theme. However, as I time went on, some key issues propped up in my experience of using the Premium News theme.

First, I felt like the theme just exerted a whole new level of pressure on me to produce really good posts on a regular (read: daily) basis. Plus, there’s that new opportunity to start video blogging thanks to the ‘featured video’ functionality of the Premium News theme. All this is good, however at my current life-situation; with all the many things I do both on-line and off-line, it’s clear that I would not be able to measure up to the new ‘demands’ or opportunities the theme has created.

One particular aspect of this is the need to find and edit a custom thumbnail image for each regular post. Sure it does give justice and add some snazz to the over-all feel of the blog but having to look for an image every time I’m going to post an update felt like a requirement and a hindrance to my blogging, for I’ve been known to post updates on-the-fly or just by impulse as ideas or braingasms hit me in the least expected times so finding a suitable image and editing it for the thumbnail sometimes kills my creative juices before I even hit the publish button. With amateur photo editing skills, the results sometimes is just crap.

The bottom line is, the Premium News theme is again an awesome theme, I loved the theme but at this point in time, it was clear that I wasn’t ready to use such a theme. I need to really improve as a blogger first, more about this on a future post. To help summarize and drive home my point, I’d like to quote again my good friend Jaypee on choosing what themes to use on our blogs:

Why did I choose this theme? The moment I saw it I just knew that it was the one. For those of you who have WordPress blogs and spend time looking for the “right” theme for your blog, you know what I mean. Right?

Okay, so why use this theme?

This theme is called the WP_Premium theme and is designed by R. Bhavesh and WP Remix. Don’t get fooled though, this ‘premium’ theme is FREE. Yes, this can be downloaded and customized to your heart’s desires for free from R. Bhavesh’s site, the same guy who created the equally awesome paid-premium WP Remix theme.

I chose this theme because it had what I was looking for in a ‘premium’ theme. A nice, elegant, clean and professional or ‘pro-blogger’ look but with out the complications of the top-class Premium News, WP Remix or Revolution themes and other similar themes. Plus, I have this fetish for minimalist themes and WP_Premium is like a perfect blend of the ‘premium’ and minimalist themes.

Here’s a Changelog, sort of

Of course, with any theme reboot, there’s that routine part of the whole process that I love so much. Tweaking to customize your theme! There are a lot of changes to the look and feel of this blog thanks to the theme reboot. Some are barely noticeable some are somewhat shocking. I’ll help tell which is which.

The ‘premium content‘ box is the first thing I really worked on. It’s the first box or segment of the sidebar where the best that this blog could offer can be found in one neat and convenient presentation. In it, are the links to the most popular & most commented posts, the tag cloud and if you can’t have enough, the site search function.

I’m still working a hack to produce the “featured posts” functionality so watch for this minor tweak in the weeks to come. Gone are the archives link and the categories list. The archives link really does not serve any good purpose nowadays and it just adds to the clutter in the sidebar. The same could be said of the categories list and since I favor tagging more than using categories, I opted to remove it from the sidebar as well.

Where’s Google AdSense?!

The most obvious change is that the Google AdSense ads have been removed from this blog, well for now. I’m still working on a layout that will be best for the new theme. However, I will be using less of AdSense ads, perhaps just a large rectangle in the sidebar and a link unit somewhere else but that’s just about it. I’m gradually weaning my self, or rather this blog from AdSense and focus more on getting direct sponsors and diversifying my income stream by using other monetization methods.

That’s why I ditched the default 100×100 square ads from this theme (Why R. Bhavesh did not use the ‘default’ 125×125 format just puzzles me) and used my current affiliate buttons as ‘filler ads’ while waiting for direct sponsors to buy some ad space. More on this once I update my Advertising page. To make advertising here more worth the buck, I installed the Got Banners plugin that manage the button ads on the sidebar and randomly rotate them with each page load so that all advertisers would be given equal exposure. This is the same plugin that John Chow uses and it works like a charm.

A refreshing new look and feel

Over all, I’m happy with the way the theme reboot has turned out. The blog now loads significantly faster. It looks clean and elegant. It invites me to just blog and not worry about anything else. Tweaks and adjustments will come up as time goes on but it will be to further improve this blog for me and you my dear readers.

If you spot any bugs or problems do alert me via the comments or tru email and I’ll work on it ASAP. Thank you for the time, I hope you’ll enjoy the new look and feel and see you again at the next post!

UPDATE

Obviously, I changed themes again. Moses Francis of WPThemesPlugin.comtarget has just released his Forte Theme, probably as part of the 1st year blog anniversary of WPThemesPlugin.com. This ‘premium’ theme has been on my wishlist for a long time and big, big props to Moses for making it available to the public for free.

Thank you Moses! You simply rock!