Well, THAT didn’t work [12]

Here is another good problem I ran into.

Changing someone else’s title didn’t work. Or, rather, it was more difficult than throwing everything away and just starting over – there was so much in there that I didn’t understand and so much that broke when I took things out.

However, from the beginning it was easier than expected. At a minimum, a WordPress theme contains index.php and style.css. – and style.css can be empty to begin with (but it should be called ‘style.css’, go figure). WordPress will use the settings for everything else if custom files are not provided. All index.php has to do is fetch some records from the database and display them, and a small piece of code is easily stolen (thanks again, Andreas!).

So, starting with some words in the middle, it was easy to add blogs, one by one. Now I have built header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php, index.php and basic style.css. WordPress application files define many functions – for example, sidebar.css is an automatic element that controls the left and right sidebar. I was half tempted to play with these files, but that was a bad idea; I have to reset my settings every time I upgrade WordPress. Also, I don’t know what I’m doing.

Fortunately, the built-in WordPress function is dawdle. For example, this is all you need to do to display a post calendar:

Don’t dawdle: get the big things to fit. Even if I give fixed values ​​for the width, width of the left and right bars and the center section, I get different pages with Opera, IE and Firefox. The math doesn’t work. Math doesn’t work for me. Math hates me.

And not a dawdle: making all the drawings look good. It’s definitely a fun part, but it’s time consuming.

I think my crazy scheme of making things look better in less shades of gray is working. Sidebars are very busy without drowning out the main story. I think. Humbly. They are also very heavy: the masthead, for example, is the largest image on the page: at 540 by 116 pixels, it is only 12K. Most of the images are around 6K. So the whole picture is smaller than I thought about the size of a single picture in the story (~40K).

Know something that didn’t work? Building it locally on my machine. Well, it worked, but it messed up looking at the graphics. You define the graphics area with code that says “look in a directory called graphics in my blog directory.” In retrospect, if I had defined my blogpath as localhost (and then changed it when I moved to the internet) it would have worked. But I got confused when the pictures are not showing up and I have been making them online. I’ll leave XAMPP on my machine, though – I have some php ideas I want to play with.

You know what ELSE didn’t work? Transferring content from the previous page. Well, it worked very well, except that it didn’t capture and upload the images. See, the images were there – that’s why I noticed when my new tools didn’t show up – but when I checked the source, it turned out that they were taken from a source on WordPress.com.

I decided very well not to move what I already had to the new location, anyway. Start fresh. I’m going to lose everything on Google that I’ve done so far, but it’s a blog.

Next: it seems. So far, I’ve been editing index.php online, but I’m leaving the Under Construction image in the default position in index.html. To create the final functions – like comments.php – I need everything in place.

Time to reveal myself!