busy and productive

[piranha]

how exceptional that is. after being a total slouch about it for 10 days, the last couple of days i've been back to beta-testing the new yaoi journalling site. created a new community and played around with that. then i needed to decide on the final (for now) pretty before letting users loose on it -- the look-and-feel, the "theme" as wordpress calls it. there are a large number of themes to choose from, but they don't just look different, they also come with different degrees of customizability. and of course i had forgotten which themes i had already checked out when i created my original journal.

so to atone for having been the sort of beta tester i hate, yesterday and today i went through all of them and created a table of capabilities. table of doom! it is freaking huge. i am 3/4 done htmlizing it so i can post it, but now my eyes are getting blurry. it was educational; i now know exactly what i really want from a theme (since most of them don't provide it all). maybe i make a couple myself (yeah, i need another project like the infamous hole in the head).

also baked some monkey bread today, which -- *gasp* -- even the paramour found a bit too fatty. it provides a total sugar and fat overdose, one can only eat it warm, and even then the stomach churns. not gonna make this recipe again. but the dough, at least, is nice -- warm yeasty dough always is for me.

Comments

[selki.livejournal.com]

What do you want from a theme?

To make sure we're talking about the same thing, on LJ, my theme lets one look at my journal and see two columns, with the entries on the left, subject and date displayed a certain way, each entry showing the particular icon I showed for that post. On the right, it shows my tag cloud (and other stuff I don't care about as much).

what i want from a theme

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, that's what i'm talking about. LJ is very flexible about user themes (but you have to learn S1 or S2 to seriously customize). wordpress itself is even more so (you can use CSS), but the wordpress MU installation i am testing doesn't allow for user themes (yet; i don't know whether there is a plugin they could install -- drupal has this, but wordpress might not. its multi-user app is really just a thin wrapper thrown around standard wordpress).

what i want for that site:

• flexible width of the content block (adjust to browser width), possibly flexible width of sidebars too; ideally choice between fixed and flexible for both independently. if fixed, specify size in pixels or percentage.
  
• choice about what to do with content that might overflow such as large images (expand to fit, resize, scroll content block)
  
• choosable position of "sidebars" (none, left, right, top, bottom)
  
• widget ready (users can design their sidebars by arranging things like tags, calendar, archives, links as they wish via a drag-n-drop interface provided by wordpress)
  
• allows for custom header and page background graphics (stored external to the site), can set background to repeat/scroll/fixed
  
• an easy way to customize fonts and colour schemes (hex codes are ok, but a colour picker with instant preview would be even better)
  
• choice of how to display categories (=tags) (cloud, list, drop-down)
  
• ranking of links and tags for display (alpha, reverse, individually weighted)
  

here are probably some more; i am not using my blog as intensively as some people use theirs. (frex i never use archives or calendar navigation so far because i've never kept a blog for any length of time.)

Re: what i want from a theme

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i'm thinking what would be really spiff, would be to have separate styling options for the main page versus individual post pages versus static pages. but now we're possibly getting into pie-in-the-sky land.

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

There was a while when I was a teenager when I was making monkey bread fairly often, though I didn't learn that name for it until many years later -- the cookbook I was using called it "golden crown ring rolls". I definitely imprinted on it/them as the ideal cinnamon-rolls experience -- lots of butter and cinnamon sugar and no sludgy white frosting -- and if leftovers are vastly improved by reheating, well, the same goes for a lot of things.

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Ha ha ha, when I just tried searching for the Golden Crown Ring Rolls recipe online, I found both the recipe (https://books.google.com/books?id=Gpvym9lYvNkC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97) and my comment above, so I will make them and also comment again!