Rough Groove

The new face of langyaw.com, my travel blog

For the past few months, I’ve been thinking of utilizing a magazine style theme for one of my blogs and after much search, I’ve come upon Michael Jubel’s Arthemia2 Wordpress theme via Gladita’s informative blog. She commented in one of my posts in langyaw.com and when I checked her site, I just fell in love with the theme.

Michael did a wonderful design. It is beautiful. I like it’s simplicity, the color scheme and how the different sections are arranged:

• The Headline allows me to highlight a new post
• The Featured section lets me drive readers to past posts that are interesting. Its an effective way of making them explore the blog more.
• The Categories bar is located below the two sections. Its a clever design and the number of items that can be placed here is just five. It would be difficult if you have more than that but it forced me to really do some category “cleaning” and narrowed it down to 5!

These top three sections are all above the fold and its usage is very commendable.

• The rest of the posts are located below the fold showing five at a time (but this can be customized). Much older items can be accessed through the pagination (WP-PageNavi is built in).
• The Sidebar is widget ready and can be configured through four sections
• Lastly, the Footer is dark, a contrast to the upper parts. This is divided in three columns with two widget ready. The last column seems to be fixed. I also like the placement of the admin links which is located at the bottom of the footer.

There’s a caveat, however. If you notice, there are thumbnail photos for the Headline, Featured and all other posts. This was achieved through the use of Wordpress’ custom fields. Fortunately, the designer provided a script that will automatically generate these images but you still need to place an entry in the said fields. Another thing, this theme needs some configuration and to do that will involve editing the index.php file and adding some category names. Instructions on these can be found at Michael’s blog.

I made slight customizations of the theme to suit my needs:

• I changed the header logo, unless you want one named with arthemia. You can readily replace the png file with your own but making it as text is possible and will need some styling
• got rid of the categories located at the top of post title

One of the biggest work that I did was that I manually generated the thumbnails. I did away with the script for two reasons:

• I can’t make it work at localhost where I test my posts, and
• I want to control the composition of the thumbnail images. For me, I want to pique the reader’s curiosity so that they will check the post

With just around 70 plus entries, it’s still manageable. However, to make this work, I made some changes to the theme files especially those governing the custom fields. I made three different key names for the following thumbnail images: Headline, Featured and all other posts. For upcoming posts, I need to input these three values.

With the initial changes implemented, the next few days will be spent fine tuning the theme like arranging the widgets, adding Google Adsense and work out some other customizations. After that, I will redesign the rest of my blogs, especially this one!