a lefty’s log

[editor’s note: this post was a part of a larger post that was really on two different ones, more unrelated than related, so i split them and backdated this one. revisionism lives. viva web 2.0]

a while ago i blogged about the travails of installing wordpress on a work macintosh. after i succeeded, it was time to work on window dressings.

i browsed the wordpress themes list and started trying out new looks. right on the first page are two themes that looked pretty good and didn’t break wordpress 2.0:

pool theme

from the wordpress themes list

it’s nice and serene, in an antiseptic kinda’ way. since i was trying to build something that returned a concise page after a search, i had to pass on this one.

connections theme

from the wordpress themes list

right there on the front page is another contender called connections. it’s nice, though pretty plain, and comes preconfigured with a highway aspect befitting my trade. alas, the search function returns the full text of every post that has the requested word or phrase. without any highlighting, this would be pretty useless. so i passed on it, and went looking for the theme i have on this site:

coffee cup.

[no photo available]

yeah, mine’s been modded some, so it’s not a good example. but manji’s page seems to be down most of the time, and if you clicked on the title up there, you’d find a messy open directory. i’m not even sure those files are usable. so i didn’t use them.

then i found this one:

caffeine theme

source: life after coffee’s home for the theme.

ah, bliss. this is great! it solved my search problem and looks good too. we’ve already modded it. but you can’t see it yet. it’s locked behind a firewall on the company intranet and i’m not at work. i’ll post a screenie later.

here it is.

it’s a little juvenile, but i was going for a lame joke i read in darby conley’s “get fuzzy” strip. i also wanted to get some buy-in with a coworker, so i let her come up with the idea and design the look. it’ll probably change after a while.

but, knowing little about css and php, i feel pretty accomplished having made these changes and wanted to share.