murder.booklocker.com

About a month ago, maybe two, I spent an entire Sunday morning crafting work-arounds for this theme. This morning I tried yet one more tweak, lost everything that I’d done and was forced to restore the virgin rendition.

After spending hours (what is it about Sunday mornings?) to restore its appearance, I’m forced to admit that I didn’t give theme selection enough thought up front. I was taken by the rich coffee color of the Ginseng Coffee theme. I even liked the huge asterisk at the top. I didn’t stop to ask myself how many categories I might conceivably have at the end of six months. Today’s stats tell me that “There are currently 148 posts and 130 comments, contained within 13 categories.” Who know?

I had never used Wordpress before. As I became more comfortable with the idea of pages versus posts, categories and subcategories, etc., there was more that I wanted to change. I found myself commenting out things and replacing them — like the big brown box that holds the asterisk. You can’t get rid of the asterisk and I haven’t found a way to cover it up. That’s lost prime real estate for me at this point.

Categories were only meant to appear on the line between the brown boxes. But I wanted to display more — so what to do? I fiddled and twiddled to bump them down and fake another category link line.

Then I fiddled and twiddled again to put the featured books from the BookLocker Virtual Tour where I wanted them.

I still can’t set up a page (not a post!) to hold a listing of categories and subcategories with the associated posts (just the headings), sort of like an index (this isn’t a problem with the theme). According to what I’ve read, I should be able to do this.

But I have no way of entering PHP into a page using anything other than the WYSIWYG editor (which immediately converts it into bastard HTML). I’ve come to the decision that it’s because I do not have access to the root. Which is darned inconvenient — I even have to ask for images to be uploaded. I finally gave up and started posting images on another site and pulling them in because it was easier. Thank God for my website where I can store them!

But back to Ginseng Coffee. I’m still happy with the colors although beginning to tire of them. I really dislike the color of the links in text. Here’s one just so you can compare with the ones that I turn blue, like this one. But, oh well. I’ve done enough tweaking that I’m not sure I could easily convert to another theme anyway.