Theme Upgrade

I spent a couple of hours upgrading my WordPress theme today. I’ve been running the Mandingo theme for several years and I really like the way it looks, but it’s limited to 1024 pixels wide. I plan on adding some new things to my website soon, and to prepare for that I wanted to change from a two-column to a three-column design. Mandingo’s fixed width squeezed the center column so much that things started breaking and I knew it wasn’t going to work. I did some searching this morning and discovered another theme that met my needs: Atahualpa. I am literally amazed at how far themes and theme configuration has come. When I first installed WordPress, any theme customization had to be performed by hand-hacking the html, modifying PHP code, and manually editing the CSS files. None of that, anymore! It’s all point-and-click now! These kids, what will they think of next!? In an hour or two I was able to get things looking mostly like (or close enough to) the old theme. The header at the top of the page (those blue flames with the Wizard of Wor guy to the left) is only a placeholder until I can slap something else together.

I also spent a bit of time organizing my WordPress categories. I don’t think most people use that feature, but I hope to better organize my posts so that people can follow what they want to follow and read what they want to read. I deleted some of the old categories that only had one or two posts in them. Don’t worry, the posts just default back to the Main category (which contains every post). I’m not sure why I thought Mick Rib needed his own category at one time, but he had one. With one post in it.

Now that the rough draft for my first novel has been turned in, I’ll be closing down write.robohara.com shortly. I’ll be exporting those posts and moving them over here into the “writing” category. As I continue to write about my writing (how’s that for meta?), or writing in general, I’ll add them to that category.

When I first launched RobOHara.com, there was no “theme” — I just wrote about whatever topic I wanted to write about. One day I might write a post about some diet I was on and the next day I might write about some goofy computer project I was working on. For some reason I convinced myself that I was driving people crazy (or away) by writing about things they weren’t interested in. I worried about it so much that I launched multiple other blogs. I had one just for my tech posts, another just for my reviews, and so on. I think I ended up with half a dozen different blogs — maybe more at one time. Anyway, the end result was that I split my audience into little pieces, people had to follow multiple blogs to read all of my posts, and some of the blogs got abandoned. I recently found myself doing that again, but I’m making an attempt to reign things back in. Instead of having a different blog for my writing and a different blog for this and for that, I’ll try to keep most of my ramblings here. For now my podcasts will remain separate (although you can find links to them from this page on the left hand side), but other than that, I’ll try not to lead you guys all over the place just to see what I’m working on and writing about. Scope crawl’s a bitch sometimes.