It is not very often that I get motivated to roll up my sleeves and fix some things that bother me about this site. Editing the look ("theme") of a WordPress site involves editing a style.css stylesheet and/or any number of .php files. Now, I don't know the first thing about either of these, so that involves a lot of googling, trial-and-error, pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth. But once I get going, I usually discover a lot of new "problems" to fix.

In many ways I was lucky when I first started this blog (and didn't know a thing about WordPress). I immediately disabled the "Visual" mode in the post editor and switched to HTML editing mode. The Visual text editor makes it impossible to align/space everything correctly, and it inserts unnecessary html tags all over the place.

I initially searched for "minimal" when searching for themes for this site. I settled on the ever-so-popular Journalist theme (preview of original). I was fortunate, because this has to be one of the easiest themes to modify. People have modified it and released unofficial versions of it, like Journalist 1.9.9.9 and Journalist 2.1. I have slowly morphed Journalist 1.9.9.9 into what you see now. It's larger, more spread out, and the photo caption boxes are different. I just have to change the title at the top of the page to a banner image and it will hardly be recognizable.

Last night I eventually got everything lined up the way I wanted (it literally comes down to shifting things 2 pixels this way, 1 pixel that way). Then I snooped around and found out how to make a permanent, auto-generated Archives page. Also--remember when I made that "WordPress Plugins Used on this Blog" entry? Well, that took a lot of work to type all that out, insert the links, and format the post. Last night I found a plugin that automatically generates a list/description of plugins, so I made a permanent page here that does the same thing. Pretty cool.

After having nice weather for a few days, we are supposed to have a couple of scorchers this weekend. Wimbledon starts Monday. My fav tournament.