Another Year, Another Theme

Posted by Stropp on December 24, 2007

A couple of weeks ago DM Osbon made the astute observation that another Stropp’s World theme was on the way when I remarked that I had downloaded a bunch of Wordpress info only to have my computer die the next day. How right he was.

At the time I was just planning an update. Over the last couple of weekends, and through last week I’ve been working on getting the new theme working.

It’s based on the Galactica theme by Web2Feel. I was struck by the look of that theme the first time I saw it, but it didn’t really have what I was after in a theme. So, I’ve heavily modified it from the original style. Some of the graphics, including the banner image, and the colour scheme remain from the original theme, but much of the layout has been changed and new parts added.

I’ve coded in a few plugins as well, including a top commentors plugin, a popular posts plugin, and a similar posts plugin. You’ll find the top commentors and popular posts in the sidebar, and the similar posts at the end of each single page post. You’ll also notice that the monthly archives, categories, and blogroll is on a panel at the bottom of the page.

I’ve also taken the step of having partial posts on the front page. It’s something that I’ve noticed other blogs doing, and which I’ve been considering for quite some time.

There is also another new feature on this blog. You can now get Stropp’s World delivered to your email inbox. This is a relatively new service offered by Feedburner where a reader can subscribe by providing their email address to Feedburner. Note that you’re not giving me your email address here, it’s Feedburner who do the mail out. Feedburner are pretty reputable by all accounts.

This is a pretty big overhaul of Stropp’s World. There’s been quite a bit of restructuring and coding been done. It’s likely there will be a few kinks to be worked out, in fact I’ve already spotted a couple of issues.

There were also a few things that I was considering putting in, but haven’t yet. I was looking at threaded comments and some additional styling for the comments, as well as some graphical headers for the posts. I’ll be looking at these over the next little while, as well as additional tweaks as I reconsider different things. I’ll admit I was somewhat impatient in wanting to get this theme out the door.

If you spot anything out of place, feel free to contact me using the contact form, or leave a comment.

I’d appreciate your feedback.

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