Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

Most of the content on the page is still the same but I have done a lot of back end work in the past couple of days. I use the WicketPixie theme that Chris Pirillo created with the help of some friends and it has served me very well. I like the layout as it allows me to add a lot of extra content to the side bars yet still have a cleaner look.

After a call out on Twitter/Facebook last week to my followers and friends, I found that many had problems with load times and broken Java. I really believe that the first public release of WicketPixie was broken by some of the things that I added to it and I have been limping without realization since then.

I did some looking and I found an updated version through http://chris.pirillo.com/wicketpixie/. The version that I downloaded was an RC or Beta depending on where you look on the site, but with a little tweaking it has worked out well. I had made quite a few changes to the original theme so I had to apply those same changes to the new version of WicketPixie.

I am happy with the outcome so far but I am curious to see what you see. Drop a comment here and let me know how it’s working. If you have and trouble at all, please send me a reply on Twitter @thesleepygeek of course :)

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?