A little clean up

Well, I was getting a little annoyed with the look of my blog and forum, so I decided to do a little clean up.

The theme I was using on the blog was called Life Is a Byte. For one reason or another, the site I got it from is no longer available. After adding the cloud widgets and some other things, I noticed that it was behaving badly on IE. Well, I wouldn’t recommend IE to my mother, so it really wasn’t a big deal. However, I did want to get it fix, so I went searching for a new theme that was similar to what I had. My thought was, I could find a similar theme and just fix the problems in the old copy, paste and steal method of the web. Well, as you can see at the bottom of each page, I found the original theme site that my old theme was based off of.

i3Theme apparently is the “most downloaded Mac theme”, according to the site MangoOrange. Well, I like mangoes, so I have no problem that it’s supposed to be a Mac theme, I just want it to work with my blog. If you look at the site, you’ll notice that the theme comes in bright blue, dark blue, red pink and green. As you can tell by my site, I did a little alterations to one of those version. I took the red version and changed the background images to fit my darker theme. If you look very closely, you’ll notice that it’s not completely black. Unfortunately, I couldn’t copy the swoosh look they have on the colored versions, so I just did some hue alterations and left it at that. It works for what I want.

The great thing about using the original theme is that the background images in the side panels now works. Of course, that means I need to go back into the cloud widgets and make the backgrounds transparent. I am happy with how it looks in FireFox, but IE has decided that it won’t work with the theme. And, it’s not just my site, because MangoOrange has the same problem when viewed through IE. I guess they figure their users for Opera, Safari or FireFox fans.

After getting that straightened out, I did a little tweak to the Forum. The biggest problem with using WordPress for the main site and phpBB3 for the forum, is there are no good links between the two. So, I can’t stick the forum inside the blog and use the blogs theme. Also, I a member can’t register in the blog and also be registered in the forum. I tried to use a hack that would do that, but it about blew up my site. So, the most I can do is use a theme close to the one I am using on WordPress. The one I found is called ProNight. The base theme is called ProSilver, so I guess that’s how they came up with the name. After getting the new theme on the blog, I took the background image and replaced the header image on the forum. Then I added a link back to the main site (you have to do that, because there is no built-in link back to the main page). To clean things up, I removed a small site logo and change the font of the forum description. I think it fits in nicely with the site, but gives the user a slightly different look, so that they know they are on the forum and not the main site.

I also made some updates to my WP People plugin for the blog.

Little by little, I’m getting things done.