femilicious.com

It’s been almost a year and a half since femilicious was born and I felt that it was time for a new look. This new theme is based on Freedom Blue by Frank Helmschrott. I chose this theme after searching off and on for a few weeks for something that wouldn’t need too much tweaking to get a look and feel I like, and in one afternoon I have something I think I can live with for awhile.

Besides changing some colours, one of the changes I made to get this theme up was to change the German text to English. I doubt it would slow down an avid blog reader but I’m not sure how many people understand the German for “submit a comment” and “email required”. I didn’t know I did until I was doing it. There are still a few words here and there that need translation to English and I’ll get to these soon. It’s just a matter of hunting down which files hold the text and editing them.

There was also an error in the Archives.php file – I had to change the id to match the other pages so that the content would wrap inside the left-hand div. The id is misnamed so if you’re trying to get this theme working on your own site change

<div id="content">

to

<div id="contentwrap">

in the fourth line of code. Once this is changed the body will sit in the left div and the sidebar will return to the right.

One of the things I like about this theme is that the divs set the main content first and the sidebar information follows. This is really important for browsing without a stylesheet. It’s not just for Naked Day anymore; people browsing from mobile devices or with a speech reader don’t want to scroll through/listen to your entire blogroll, archives, and categories before they get to your new post. If you want to see how your divs are laid out, one easy way is install the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, then on the CSS tab select Disable Styles then choose All Styles. You can get a pretty good idea here of what your site will look like to someone with a text only browser. If things are not good you can fix it by rearranging your divs so the most important content comes first and controlling presentation with floats.

I decided to try out a random html flickr badge for some colour and life. It’s also for my own benefit as a happiness generator. It makes me happy to see pictures that I took on vacation or somewhere else fun. There were some problems finding a placement for the badge that didn’t throw the entire site presentation out of whack. I had originally thought to place it in the header but had a much easier time setting it at the top of the main style template after the call for the get_header function. Opera and MSInternet Explorer didn’t like the having CSS information in the php file so I had to cut it out and move it into the stylesheet. Now that I’ve done that it’s looking good in Opera but MSIE still needs a bit of tweaking. MSIE is a nightmare for incompatibilities. For that reason, if you’re not already using it, you might want to get firefox – it will make your life so much better, and not just if you’re developing for the web. For added browsing pleasure, install AdBlock Plus and you can take advertising right out of your life.

I still want to bring back the categories list and the blogroll but those need a bit more work so they’ll have to wait for another day. If you find a glaring mess in any browser please leave a comment.

Update: Right above the comment text box are some buttons whose labels were in German until an few minutes ago. The values for the buttons were in a separate javascript file, sitting in wp-content / themes / this theme and lo-and-behold there it was. I knew it was javascript and that it was somewhere but it took me awhile to find it. I’ve changed those to English now as well. If you mouseover you can read the German. Enjoy.