Ladd's Blog

WOW… My very first Blog post! (yea… yea…whatever)

For several weeks now I have had domains, hosting accounts, applications like WordPress, etc. sitting on my mind (and my iMac) and I have been tinkering with setting up this blog. I have documented all of my movements and actions mostly for myself, but also to share with people that may be traveling down the same road I have been down lately. (those posts coming)

The technical stuff has been pretty easy for me. But the nagging question has been… What theme (WordPress theme in this context) am I going to use? I have spent hours looking at the themes available but I’m ME. I wouldn’t buy a motorcycle someone else has customized. (and I like customizing and riding motorcycles) I decided that only my OWN theme would suffice. So I decided I would start with the default Kubrick theme and “looks be damned” it would be that way until I coded my own theme!

I was OK with the plain-jain default theme until I noticed it was fixed-width and SKINNY! This I needed to change immediately!!! So I start googling to find someone who had changed the width of the default theme. I used to often say in the corporate IT world “We aren’t the first one’s to see this… Google it!”. That is when I found this post by Lynn Wallenstein.

Lynn’s “Designers Default” theme was exactly what I had anticipated I would have to create. A starting point. A template for all of my future theme development that was clean and hadn’t been mucked up by someone. Now, I haven’t spent much time with her template yet but her mentioning “comments” several times caught my attention. I comment ALL of my code very thoroughly and appreciate the same in someone else’s!

Time will tell if this was the best approach. But I have a feeling that Lynn saved me days of trial and error and for that I am appreciative.