General

What did I do all weekend? A New Theme!

Actually, I did two things over the weekend:

1. “Finished” the retaining wall (still have some some work to do but the blocks are in place) and
2. Implemented a new theme at Clever Dude

While looking for a theme for a new site I’m developing, I ran across the Daily32 theme at DailyBlogTips.com and liked it so much that I spent about 30 hours rewriting the whole thing to what you see now. You can see from the Daily32 Demo that not much has stayed the same in the conversion process. Most importantly, I added a 2nd column (so it looks like my old theme), changed almost all of the colors, and “rewrote” a number of behind-the-scenes code that supports things like:

• Separating trackbacks from comments
• Redoing almost all of the stylesheet (it was quite messy)
• Taking the stupid display:block off the “a” styles so the text wasn’t bumped down to the next row. Seriously, who thought of doing that?
• Changed the subheader and footer headers to be text instead of images. Anything that means a faster load time is better for you!

Anyway, most of this is just geek-talk to most of you, but to me, it was a whole weekend of work (actually, about 5 days). It’s been 10 months since the last “refresh”, but this is the biggest change. The other themes were all basic header, header image, 2-3 columns and footer. This one has big blocks where I can place more stuff!

Oh, and I’d like to acknowledge David at My Two Dollars who has the same theme and was the final impetus for making me start the change.