June 8th, 2009 |
Well, I have already started the redesign of my beetle site, salagubang.net, a plan that I have been pondering for the last few months but was only done late last week starting with the blog. I like the Bosco theme but I got bored with it as it has been the same old theme ever since I’ve started the blog section exactly two years ago.
One major change of the theme is the expanded width which is now 960 pixels from the previous 760. This, to accommodate a general sidebar which I can use to feature links and posts as well as upcoming downloads and other stuff. You see, in the previous theme, the sidebar can only be found at the blog section. This time, it will be implemented site wide including the HTML pages.
As the width was increased, the challenge now is how can I address the posts section from around 460pixels to 760. I want to retain the previous width as it will really be too tedious to do the changes with the new width. I don’t want to edit each and every post to accommodate the expanded length. My solution? Implement the same style I did with my Binary Silver wordpress theme.
Each post has a sidebar that is 300 pixels wide which will contain the title as well as the date, tags and comments. With this, I can still retain the previous width, have a cleaner, more elegant design as well as give me the option to include a 300×250 ad rectangle in the single page. What you can see now is a theme with plenty of white space, a pleasing layout that lets my post breath.
Another major change is the index file at root. Previously, it was a simple HTML file that has a static image of a beetle, the title and subtitle, count as well as a few links to the major parts of the site. In the current design, I’ve opted to use the wordpress page instead of a static HTML. This will enable me to have the same header and footer look. For the content section, I replaced it with one without a sidebar. With the nextGEN gallery plugin, I now have a beetle slideshow featuring some spectacular species in my collection.
However, as of this time, I am having problems with this one. When I opted to have a page for my index or front page, whenever I click on the blog, it gets redirected to the index page. This I am still trying to address. For the meantime, the front page is the blog section.
What’s next? With the blog already redesigned, I will address the index/frontpage problem. Beyond that, I am already starting the redesign of the static HTML pages with the new theme. I have already finished some parts like the checklist as well as gallery which will be uploaded within the week. For the individual species and papers pages, it will take much longer because of the number as well as I cleaned up the underlying CSS as it has become too messy.
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I just submitted four of my blogs for the Philippine Blog Awards (PBA) 2009. Looking at the guidelines, there are now major changes that I think are good considering the problems that were apparent last year. I for one encountered one when they didn’t change the category of my 
