Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
This is progress?
Question: do any of you have as much trouble reading this font as I do?
What I Did Today
by
Doug H.
With much crying and gnashing of teeth, I:
- Switched to the only other WP theme I can use without figuring out precisely where to put new downloaded themes. (I thought I had this one figured out. I really did. But the new themes do not appear as options.) Consequently, my sidebar and my posts now line up.
- Figured out how to move my sitemeter to this site.
- Crashed the old site.
- Uncrashed the old site, mostly.
- Managed to move over 27 of the 500+ posts from the Blogger site before the importer-software-thingy seized up and wouldn’t transfer any more posts.
- Categorized those 27 posts because it was one of the few things I could figure out how to do.
- Finished the laundry.
- Did the grocery shopping.
I also finished Tamara Siler Jones’s Threads of Malice. Wow. More on that later this evening.
I wish I could:
- Figure out how to get the rest of my Blogger posts over here. When I try to repeat the import, the computer monitor stares back at me slack-jawed as a Deliverance banjoist.
- Figure out how to employ the template of my choice. I’ve put it in the right directory, but it’s still not showing up as an option.
- Not quite as important, but I’d love to learn how to customize the header like some of y’all have managed to do.
Back to real blogging soon. I promise. Meanwhile, I’m going to try out Dean’s Tortiere recipe. (Damn. Forgot the celery salt!)
Homemade pizza tonight; I’m going to prepare the tortiere filling in advance and bake it tomorrow.
D.
Seems to be working! And homemade pizza sounds wonderful.
The header banner is just a .jpg file located somewhere in with the theme. Different theme authors put it in different places, usually in a folder called /images or /pictures, something like that. Once you have the picture, you can edit it to suit yourself, put text on it or whatever.
The incoming theme goes into the /wp-content/themes directory. It has to go into a folder named exactly the same as the zipfile you downloaded. This seems to matter to the program. It caused me problems when I started. The theme showed, but word press wouldn’t recognize it.
Word press has a good website, with instructions, downloadable plugins and themes, etc, at http://www.wordpress.org, I think.
Check out our other two blogs, at http://www.catzcradle.net and http://www.serenitygarden.org, just to get an idea what these two themes look like, and what you can do with them.
Importing pictures is easy. Put a folder in somewhere in your directory at your server. Ourse is http://www.platypuspool.com/images. Upload your pictures to this directory using either your own ftp software, or the utility supplied by your server. Once they are there, you can insert them into a post using the command above the box where you compose your posts.
Check the platypuspool blog. Right click the pictures and you will see where they are located. A little html is helpful here. If you want the text to wrap around the picture, rather than the picture standing alone separating blocks of text, add the following items to the html code that the command writes in your post.
align=”left” or align=”right” Puts the picture along the left or right margin.
hspace=”10″ Puts a 10 pixel space next to the picture so that the text won’t run right up against it. You can use any number; I use ten.
As far as importing posts or files from blogger goes, I have no idea. Perhaps the word press codex (on their site) will have information about this. I have only ever used word press off a server where they provided it to me. If you have any other questions, let me know and I’ll be happy to help out any way I can. Today I am reformatting a computer for hedgehog. Email me if you have any questions. I’ll check my email often.
Thanks for being kind to hedgehog. It has been a long grind for her. I really appreciate it.
peacefrog
The platypus’ other half.
Just let us all know when to stop going over to the old blogger site…
Good luck with the whole project!
Thanks for stopping by, Charlene.
Peacefrog, any time you or hedgehog need anything, email me or give me a call (believe it or not, I have full contact info over at the Medical Consumer’s Advocate site. You might need to snoop around a little, but it’s pretty obvious.
You’ve given me a leg up — thanks. I’m off to futz now.
R.B., I won’t be putting up any new posts at the Blogger site, so you can make this your one-stop-ball’n’walnuts-shop 😉
Doug
Looking good here, Doug! Though I’m not finding the text as easy to read as the last place, but I’m managing :o)
Wow. I leave for a week and everything goes to hell.
So Blogger finally got on your last nerve, eh? I can’t say I blame you. But for a free service, it’s not bad. I don’t have nearly the readership that you do,* so I’m not going to jump ship just yet. But I have been thinking about it. I wouldn’t mind having a few more features at my disposal. I like the idea of categorizing your posts. At the moment, I do that manually, updating my sidebar every time I add a new one. It’s a pain.
I will follow your continued progress with WordPress with keen interest.
(* Which is probably due to my conscious avoidance of the three big internet topics: a. politics, b. sex, and c.boogers.)
I like to modify themes with different graphics as you can see in my archive, http://monicajackson.com/index.php and my current blog http://monicajackson.com/blog.
You need to put the url [img src=”http://dougsplace.com/images/header.jpg”] of your nifty new graphic in the header.php file, taking care not to frick anything up. Make sure the graphic approximates the size of the one you’re replacing.
I usually put the graphic where the (title)(/title) goes or the former blogheader went. I use Dreamweaver and make generous usage of the undo feature. I can save it and still undo whatever I did. This is invaluable because since I don’t know much about php, I learn by trial and error.
To modify the theme colors, fonts and add background graphics, you need to modify your css file. There’s a free program called topstyle lite http://www.bradsoft.com/download/index.asp that helps you see what you’re doing with those.
Don’t know if I helped, but I tried.
Hey Doug,
Do you still need a hand with the fonts, etc? If so, mail me at my gmail address and let’s try and set something up…
-pat
Thanks, folks. Monica, can I be the short, paunchy, nearly bald and not particularly attractive dude you hang with in order to impress your friends how you’re really not into looks and stuff? Cuz you’re COOL. (Sorry to be flippant. I really do appreciate the advice ;))
Pat, I’ve left a note at your place, but I’ll see if I can’t email you, too.
Thanks again, everyone. If I can change the font, I’ll be happy at least for a little while.