theme

I have a personal website that hosts all my family pictures and run it with Gallery2. It’s an awesome piece of photo sharing software that is customizable with themes. I have tried many of the default themes and also downloaded a few but was fairly happy with one called ICE that I have had installed since last year.

A friend of mine who is heavy into photography and has some amazing work; signed up for his own web space and has installed Gallery2. In the effort to display his photos with a clean and functional theme he went out searching… and promptly found a theme that I have installed as well.

The theme is called Ebony English. The reason for this is that the theme author is Chinese and has a simplified Chinese version as well. You can find the theme here and install it very easily following the directions on the site.

For a demo the author has chosen a website with some nudity so be warned, it can be found here.

Great theme and thanks to my buddy Jay! His website can be found here. Don’t expect a ton of content yet because the site was just built today, but I know him and there will be new stuff coming!

I have been working on this site more with the back end theme options that posting in the past week. You must all know by now that I have been working off site and that’s adding about 3 hours to my commute everyday. That’s taking time away from my TheSleepyGeek time.

So now that I have WicketPixie setup and running, I want to know what you think! Drop me an email at marcus@hamaker.net. The orange background won’t be the regular colour but I am supporting the Dutch side in the Euro2008 Football tournament. So for now, it’s Oranje!!!

Hup Holland Hup!

As for the theme itself? It is quite complex so there are a lot of things to set up. To get it working correctly I had to make some modifications to code at the php level. Not something that I was completely comfortable doing myself at the beginning but it forced me to learn some php code which was a great byproduct of doing this project. Now I think I am starting to like my layout. I am kind of at the same place I was with the other theme I was using; pages and widgets are in the right spots but now it’s time to move forward.

It’s time to unleash the power of the theme. One of the things that I am most interested in is the social me page. That’s really something that Chris Pirillo came up with for his site but it is so well done I feel the need to copy it outright. Look for that in the near future.

I have been waiting for the new Wicketpixie theme from Chris Pirillo for a couple of weeks. He has released the new version of it and I have installed it on my website.

NOW! I need to configure it There are so many options and possibilities with this theme that I am a little confused as to where to start. There are a few things that Chris recommends on his post such as plugins. I installed those and now I need to customize how the page is laid out. The problem with it is that there is some customizing to do straight in PHP. Not sure how that will work out.

Wish me luck.

I have been waiting for Chris to release his new social media theme called WicketPixie for a couple of weeks and it looks like he might have to put that off for a bit while he helps out his folks. So try and get something working that looks a little nicer than the plain one I had installed, I went searching

I came across a theme called CorporateID and the basic colours made me look twice. So I have taken that and made a few minor changes to make it something more me. I have put back the TheSleepyGeek picture at the top, a shot from the balcony at the cottage. Then I removed some images that are the background of the sidebar titles. They were too flashy for me.

So there you have it. Until Chris has the time to work on the final versions of his theme, I think we are sticking with this.

Comments?

Now that I have the comments working (the problem was caused by the theme I was using) I now have installed a really cool little plugin. It allows you to login to the site with an OpenID to post a comment. Many of us have an OpenID thought a service that we already are a member of. Most notably are Yahoo, AOL and Flicker however there are many more on the list.

I encourage you to register locally on the site if you wish. That feature is working and even preferred so that I have a more complete profile of you. That’s nice when looking at comment posts.

If you decide to use the OpenID approach, please have a look at your profile before posting. Some OpenId providers such as Yahoo will give you a name about 3 characters long full of gibberish. It doesn’t look nice and I can’t credit you with comments if I need to.

Now the next step in this process is to get the theme fixed. I am really torn because I love the theme I was using but don’t really want to invest much time in repairing it. I plan to use Chris’ social media theme that he is working on for his site. At this time he has said that he plans to make it free for everyone’s use.