So, in a sense, I’ve returned to my roots and in the process, become once again (ah, bliss!) an end user. We all know how much fun that can be.

One idea I’ve been toying with is that of setting up this site in particular and possibly all of my sites so that the user can select a style or theme. I know I was contemplating doing that early on in the design phase of Techismo.

What I thought I’d do was link stylesheets from a dropdown menu. In other words, I might design different features, or say, different styles of menus for the page, then let users who were curious and interested enough choose the versions of things they liked best. There was Javascript involved, naturally, but in most if not all cases there would be a different version of a stylesheet downloaded as well. While I was initially concerned with things such as versions of menus, I considered taking the whole idea as far as re-creating a theme or skin.

This is not a totally novel idea, even for websites; I believe I must have seen it done somewhere.

Well, I still think these are all good ideas, but as I’m coding at best very part-time, I try to keep paring away at the piles of unfinished posts and pages while paying attention to styles and coding as much as I can or must.

I say as much as I “can or must” because one bad practice I find resurfacing is my old tendency to make code changes too late in the evening. The end result is inevitably disaster, and then I have to spend at least half an hour, usually more, going through the panicky process of first trying to fix it, then doing a restore if my fixes don’t work right. (That late in the night, they seldom do.) About 20 years ago, I made a rule for that: don’t code past 10 o’clock at night or when you’re overly tired. But that’s a subject for another editorial, and I digress.

As an interim measure, I’ve decided to risk appalling my readers (does either of you really mind?) by changing the look or theme of this site; that is, using this site itself to illustrate themes that I find interesting. That doesn’t mean they’ll be my own themes; it’s going to be a while before I find time for that. Since I became a beginner all over again when I started using Wordpress, I’m still trying to find the time to convert the page designs I originally did for Techismo over to Wordpress themes. I’ve gradually gotten to do enough peeking under the covers of Wordpress to comprehend how I would go about that, but it’s going to take a really sustained bout of creativity to pull it all together, and I don’t anticipate having such uninterrupted stretches of time in the foreseeable future.

So I’ll be selecting new themes such as the one introduced today—Shades of Gray, by Leslie Franke—on a totally arbitrary schedule, then perhaps tweaking or altering it to show how easily it can be customized.

All of which brings me back to something I mentioned in a previous post: the use of the Sandbox theme. As I think I’ve said before, I’d like to convert my original Techismo page designs to work within Sandbox on Wordpress. Oddly enough, a step in that direction is installing Shades of Gray, which is in fact a Sandbox design. That is, Shades of Gray can be installed just like a regular theme once you have the Sandbox theme installed.

As you can see, this is a very cool idea.

So basically, when you install Shades of Gray, all you’re doing is substituting a more sophisticated style sheet for the basic one provided with Sandbox, which relies largely on browser defaults. We haven’t seen those in so long we tend to forget just how ugly they are.

For the moment, I’ve converted this web site to run the Shades of Gray theme (or, more technically, CSS design) just as it is “out of the box.” Someday soon, I’ll replace the default image (a photo of 1911 Akron, Ohio taken from the Library of Congress collection) with something of my own design or choosing (like maybe my original Web Developer’s Notebook header image, if I can still resurrect it from the flotsam and jetsam of my fried laptop hard-drive).

Also, you should be aware that Shades of Gray is one of the 46 CSS designs entered in the Sandbox Designs Competition. The submission deadline for that competition has now passed, but as of this writing, the winners have not been selected yet. There are many other worthy designs that were submitted, so go on over and check it out.

These designs illustrate the beauty and simplicity of providing a Wordpress theme that is readily altered through CSS alone, though it does supply additional horsepower through the class structure provided by the functions. More about that some other time when I’ve had a chance to play with it.

Meanwhile, use the Live Preview feature at the competition site to check out designs you might like to download yourself.

Please take a look and tell me what you think.

This is from a theme called Feather 1.0 by Andy Mathijs. Perhaps the best thing about the theme (and I personally find it stunning) is its developer. If my own experience is any indication, Andy supports the product fully and promptly.

My own problem with the theme was that as downloaded, it did not work right in Firefox or Opera, though it was splendid in Internet Explorer—essentially a one-browser solution, which I can’t use, since I don’t want to leave out the FF and Opera users even on a non-developer site.

The fix was easy enough. The sidebar—which floats left—did not have a width specified. (I had thought that was a problem for IE, not the other two, but I’d been away from writing style sheets for a while. Eventually I remembered that whenever you float something, you have to specify a width. IE is the one that doesn’t conform to the specs, so it was the one that didn’t choke. Firefox and Opera worked properly, refusing to float the sidebar that didn’t have a width. The width, in this case, specifies the space for the text.)

Presumably Andy did his development and testing with IE (usually the problem browser, after all) and missed that little detail in at least one released version of the theme. His mistake, not mine. But I thought his handling of it was impressive.

Not only did his reply to my email contain the details of the fix, but it concluded with the sentence–and I quote—”Just let me know if you do/don’t know how to edit the css file, if you don’t know how to then I’ll help you out with it.”

Wow.

I responded with some stupid questions (things I could have figured out for myself if I’d taken ten minutes to half an hour to browse the code) and he was never condescending or impatient. What’s more, he was amazingly prompt! Granted, we had the time zones working for us. I would email my question late in the PM my time (EDT) as he was presumably about to start his day in Belgium, and when I got up the next morning, there would be his response: clear, concise, and to the point.

It just doesn’t get any better. I give Andy Mathijs an AAA+++ as an overall rating. We all have our own design viewpoints, and whether or not the version I’ve almost settled on is an improvement or a desecration of his original design, I’ll leave up to my readers. (Please do let me know what you think.) It does still look slightly difference (colors only) in IE and Firefox, a situation I haven’t gotten to examine yet.

Since my intention really is to move toward a three-column design (always my preference) I might not even keep this theme for Health Spectator. I might decide to modify it to my three-column needs or just start afresh with something else. (I’m trying to find time to work with Sandbox, as I mentioned in an earlier post. It’s too ugly for me to use with just the defaults, but once you merge in your own favorite style sheet, I imagine it really sings.)

But I wanted readers to know that they can do a lot worse than to download Feather 1.0 or probably any other design by Andy Mathijs at Mindloop.

During the design phases of Techismo, for example, I spent a lot of time developing styles in CSS, coding HTML, and perfecting Javascript routines to help me with collapsible menuing systems and navigational themes. When it came time to begin production, I was still tweaking these themes across browsers. Those issues, combined with a little real-life complexity, led me to hold off plans for a launch of what I would call Techismo the magazine, but I did nevertheless pound out an occasional episode of what I think of as Techismo the blog.

Meanwhile, choosing the same blog design for this site quickly proved a form of compromise, given that the originally intended subject was one that lent itself more to a page-oriented developmental approach, since so much of what I planned to discuss was issues in design and implementation of actual, functioning web pages. As detailed in an earlier post, I chose Wordpress as my blog vehicle, and as recent readers of these pages will be well aware, I chose to use the default theme, Kubrick, at least while I learned the ropes.

Of course, the blogs soon took on lives of their own, at least in terms of interests, since I soon found myself reporting on the legal, political and economic issues confronting us as users of technology, whether that technology be the latest in web technologies or streaming music. That was within the pages of Techismo, of course, where I found the vicissitudes of Internet radio a compelling issue in itself, not to mention its ramifications for pieces I had planned and even written on subjects such as streaming radio and hardware devices.

Through all this, my abandoning painstaking page design to become a novice at what I regarded as sort of a page-generator package (Wordpress) was both a source of frustration and of relief. Frustration because I felt removed from the design process that I considered an organic part of writing for the web; relief because it essentially freed me from those frustrations, particularly as they concerned cross-browser compatibility (though not completely) and enabled me at least to focus on writing.

I was delighted therefore, when I began to look around a bit at alternatives that might free me from the self-imposed Wordpress constraints that I had taken on much as a Buddhist monk might declare a vow of chastity. I found a few ready-made themes that held promise, some because they gave me three columns readily, others because they achieved a level of elegance in design itself that was both exhilirating and refreshing.

While I hope to talk about all of these in future installments, for the moment I am delighted to report my experience in the remaking of Health Spectator as a more mature product, at least in its presentation and packaging. So far, for that purpose, I have chosen the theme Feather 1.0 by Andy Mathijs, a Belgian developer with Mindloop, while considering others such as Bob’s Big Blue and Chris Pearson’s Cutline 3-Column Split 1.1; even a few themes from plaintext, such as Scott Allan Warwick’s Barthelme, which you (most likely) see here. I say, most likely because I have been flipping back and forth between Barthelme and Bob’s Big Blue for this site. Barthelme is I think, by far the cooler, while Big Blue gives a genuine 3-column layout and feels customizably homey.

So, for the moment, Health Spectator is stunned out in Feather 1.0 with a few of my own modifications, while this blog and Techismo are heading towards Barthelme. Actually, for Techismo I have been downright experimenting with Sandbox, a cruder-looking quantity right out of the box, but readily customizable just with CSS. I already find myself enchanted.

So however briefly, I’m at least getting to experience the joy again of getting my fingers into the code and making it do what I want, standing on the backs, as I do it, of other good designers.