I’m experimenting with a new theme called Thesis which is now running the look and feel of this blog. Thesis is created by Chris Pearson, a US-based web developer who has produced some pretty cool WordPress themes over the years.

Thesis is a very good example of a new breed of WordPress theme - a theme that contains some intelligence in its creation and significant added value to go along with it, all of which enables you the blogger to adapt it to your specific requirements without having to do any PHP code editing.

You can do almost all your tweaking with a combination of the Thesis Options page in your blog, which appears once you’ve installed and activated the theme, and a custom cascading style sheet (CSS).

What you’re looking at today is Thesis literally out of the box. About the only design thing I’ve done so far is add some of my own images to the rotating images feature you see at the top right of the page which automatically changes the image as you move from post to post on the site.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep that feature - it’s quite neat, though - nor what elements of the out-of-the-box theme I’ll change or adapt.

Whatever I decide to do will largely be driven by my desire and wish to have something that is a bit personal to me and this blog and not just another cookie-cutter WordPress theme (or as the default WordPress tag line says whenever you install a new blog, ‘just another WordPress weblog’), points directly address by Chris Pearson:

Just a WordPress theme? Hardly. Thesis is a search engine optimized HTML + CSS + PHP framework equipped with an innovative options panel that makes it easy for anyone to run a professional, customized blog or Website (without being a code jockey).

For some months, I’ve been thinking about re-designing my main blog as I’ve had the current design for about a year (my own adaptation of a WordPress theme created by Michael Pollock).

So part of my reason for installing Thesis here is to play around with it as a potential prelude to implementing it on the main blog. Or not.

Another theme I was considering is one of the Revolution series of themes by Brian Gardner. Like Thesis, Revolution adds intelligence to provide you with easy-to-understand controls from within your WordPress blog admin to tweak the design pretty much how you’d like without your having to dive into any coding.

Revolution is becoming quite ubiquitous, which was a downside for me. I see too many blogs using one or another of the themes in the series without much customization. A bit cookie cutter.

Of course, Thesis could end up like that. But it’s early days yet and I just like this one better.

Earlier I mentioned that Thesis has ‘added value’ to go along with its added intelligence.

That ‘added value’ comes primarily in the shape of a full-blown support forum as well as online help, tutorials and other useful content on the Thesis blog that Chris Pearson maintains.

All of this represents quite a commitment and so if you want Thesis and all the extras that come with it, you’ll have to pay for it to the tune of $89 for a single-blog license. I’m more than happy to do that.

Thesis and Revolution (which also provides a forum, tutorials, etc) are leaders in the pack of so-called premium WordPress themes - themes that you pay for and get additional value beyond the collection of PHP files, CSS, JavaScript and images you upload to your server.

You do have a number of alternatives that range the scale between free themes and hiring a theme designer to develop your own exclusive theme.

But for me, Thesis seems to be nice middle ground.

The upgrade itself was straightforward, quick and relatively easy, thanks to the clear installation guide in the new 3.2 manual.

So no complaints at all from the installation/upgrade point of view. Following that guide - plus an excellent mini-tutorial by Elise Bauer on upgrading - means that anyone should be able to achieve a smooth installation or upgrade no matter their skill/knowledge level with Movable Type. So if you’re a complete MT newbie like me, you should be ok.

Where I have some disappointment, though, is after the install (or upgrade, in my case).

I do realize that, if you want simplicity in your blog platform, without having to be concerned at all with installing or doing anything like that, then you’d go with a hosted blog service like TypePad (for instance) as such things are taken care of for you. If you want to get under the hood, so to speak, then MT (for instance) might be your choice.

Yet I would still expect some things to be a lot easier to understand than they currently are if attracting newbies to the platform is one of Six Apart’s goals.

With version 3.2, there certainly is a lot of great new functionality that would clearly attract anyone looking for a better balance of total control of their blog structure with an easier way to tweak things than with previous versions. Before, you’d need to be pretty clued in to understanding MT’s tags especially, or be at least willing to acquire some essential knowledge of them and how they work.

Not for the casual user or the faint-hearted, really.

Version 3.2 does give you quite a bit of the TypePad-style hand-holding re blog set up and changing the look-and-feel. The new StyleCatcher feature, for instance, is an excellent concept and will go a long way to tempting newbies looking for easier options in control for their blogging needs to move or migrate to MT.

Yet it seems to me that such great features are not well implemented. My experience with StyleCatcher has been very disappointing - it doesn’t seem to work both in using it and retrieving new styles from Six Apart’s online library (nothing downloaded would actually be saved on my server).

Yes I know 3.2 has only just come out. But it’s no longer a beta! I’d certainly expect it to be a lot easier to dive in after installation and do what you want to do with the new features and functionality. And I’d certainly expect the help system to be a bit more complete - every question-mark link I clicked on from within my MT installation got to the online MT help system with pages saying “Coming soon…” That’s just not good enough.

So I’m spending far too much time scratching my head and trying to figure out why something doesn’t work. It looks like quite a few others are doing their own head-scratching as well.

I contrast this experience with WordPress - total simplicity by comparison.

But I will persevere. I want to use Movable Type. It’s far too much hard work from the outset, though, with just getting up and running.

In combining those suggestions with ones I’ve already had, plus my own thinking, things are leaning towards the hosted server solution. And I would very likely use Movable Type for my blogs; more on that in a minute.

So I’ve been looking around to see what’s out there.

My first choice would be GoDaddy. My experience with them - I’ve bought domains there - is very good and their offerings for hosted space are also good. The only negative at the moment is that they don’t seem too clued in about using their hosting service for running blogs, judging by the responses from their support team to my emails asking about Movable Type support.

I’m also looking at Bluehost and Midphase, two hosting services that seem to have rave reviews by users. Both offer very attractive deals. I used the recommendations from the Hosting Comparison site which has some great reviews of the various offerings out there.

I did look at PowWeb, but was a bit put off by lots of negative comments from users in their own support forum.

So, decisions to be made soon.

Meanwhile, I’m trying out Movable Type version 3.17 which I have as part of my membership in the Six Apart Professional Network.

I’m trying MT out on a local computer, set up as a server so it will run. I followed Six Apart’s excellent step-by-step instructions for installing it on a Windows PC.

Still a bit of learning to do, though - while the MT install went perfectly, the MT-check script which ran on my first use this morning produced this error:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user ”@’localhost’ (using password: YES)

Need to figure out what I did wrong in the configuration, which I suspect is more to do with the MySQL setup and access rights to the database than with MT.

Also getting some great knowledge from Learning Movable Type, a truly excellent resource by Elise Bauer.

Stay tuned…

In January, I made a major design change to the main blog and started this blog, where you’re reading this post. The design on the main blog has been in its current form since then.

When Six Apart upgraded the TypePad service earlier this month and included a raft of new design templates and themes, that got me thinking again about the look-and-feel of both of my blogs and is it to time to change. So with this blog, I applied one of the new designs (the Powell Street 2-column left template) which is what you see today.

I didn’t apply any of the new designs to my primary blog. The main reason is that the blog currently uses a customized version of a standard 3-column template which I’ve changed quite a bit. So applying one of the new design templates would mean that I’d need to spend quite a bit of time in customizing that, and doing it on the live blog.

While I’m quite willing to spend time on customizing, the idea caused me to think more about getting direct access to the template HTML code and creating something a bit more unique from the design and layout points of view.

My service level on TypePad is TypePad Plus. To get direct access to the template code, I’d need to upgrade to TypePad Pro (here’s the comparison chart of all three TypePad service levels). So I’ve been thinking about that quite seriously. My paid TypePad subscription still has another year to run so I’d just need to pay the difference in cost between Plus and Pro (about $60 for the year).

But is getting access to the HTML code a good enough reason to upgrade? That would be the prime reason for doing it. Yes, I’d also be able to have an unlimited number of blogs plus add multiple authors, but I don’t have much need for that right now.

So is upgrading to Pro what I need to do? If I did, I’d look closely at editing CSS not HTML. For that I’ll need a CSS editor (the one I’ve been thinking about is Top Style, created by Nick Bradbury who is also the creator of the FeedDemon RSS aggregator for Windows). I’m very comfortable with the idea of CSS editing (heck, I wrote my first HTML pages way back in 1993) so coding a site doesn’t give me major concerns (well, apart from the time commitment to do it).

This all raises a bigger question for me, though.

If I am going to make such a move, should I really be considering a self-hosted solution? That is, either installing my own server or subscribing to a server hosting service and using a tool like Movable Type (I have a copy as I’m a member of the Six Apart Pro network) or WordPress?

I don’t think self-hosting is a viable option for me so a hosted server solution is what I’d be considering.

There’s another consideration, too. Visitor traffic to my main blog is steadily increasing to the extent that I’m now consistently exceeding my monthly bandwidth allowance with TypePad. For instance, looking just now I see that actual bandwidth usage so far this month is over 7 gigabytes (the allowance is 5) with the projected usage by month’s end at 9.6 gigs. This percentage of excess usage (nearly double the allowance) has been going on for the past five months. So I might be hearing from TypePad about upgrading anyway

I’m getting different suggestions from friends with no clear majority recommendations. If you have any suggestions as I continue to think this through, I’d greatly appreciate hearing them.

One of those features is a raft of new templates. So I’m experimenting a bit with that. I’ve just changed the look of this blog, using the new Powell Street theme.

I like it. Do you?

It’s just a two-column layout (I had three columns before) which is one of the new pre-defined themes choices under Cool Themes. I haven’t included all the various different typelists I have, including a very lengthy blogroll (that’s still on my main blog). I’ve used all the template defaults and not, as I did before, adjusted things like column widths, colours, etc.

Changing layouts on the fly on this blog is easy, much more so than making such changes on my main blog which uses a heavily-customized template. Plus I don’t want to make experimental changes there - that’s why I have this blog

There might be more changes as I play around with this, so don’t get too used to any theme at the moment.

Technorati tag: typepad

What I did was upload two files to the root directory of the blog - the new style sheet plus the new banner image. The style sheet overwrote the one that was there. Then, I opened the blog in Firefox expecting to see the new layout - but the original one displayed.

I refreshed the browser, then emptied the cache and tried again - still the old look. Tried it in Internet Explorer, refreshed, emptied the cache - still the old look.

Then I thought: let’s check the settings from within TypePad. Maybe it isn’t just a simple matter of uploading a new style sheet. And that is the case - it is not just a matter of doing that when you make a major design change. At least, not with TypePad Plus, the service level I have, which doesn’t let you directly edit page code or stylesheets.

When I looked at the design settings, I discovered that they were all still set to the blog layout as it was before the changes. Fixed pixel widths. The previous banner. So I manually adjusted the settings, uploaded the new banner through the settings interface (ie, not uploading it directly as I had done), and saved. This time, the new look took effect.

While I’m curious about how this all works, I’m not that curious! It works and I’m happy with the implementation. But note for any future change: whatever you do to the stylesheet, you still have to make the changes from within TypePad. And that has significant limitations on what you can do.

I’ve picked one which I like a lot, a considerable improvement on my efforts. But I encountered one little problem that’s all too common with graphics for the web - shifting colours with GIFs.

Here’s what I mean.

• Release Candidate 3 - with the new banner at the top. Look closely at the blue background.
• Release Candidate 4 - with my tweaked new banner version at the top. Again, look closely at the blue background.

With RC3, you can see a slight but marked difference in the blue background about three-quarters of the way along to the right. With RC4, there is no colour difference.

The banner in RC3 has the blue set as 345C84 (RGB: 52.92.132) whereas the colour should be 2D5781 (RGB: 45.87.129) as it is in the blue background behind the banner.

The way I solved this was to take the banner and make the blue (which has palette entry number 28) as transparent, then save it as a new GIF image. No other changes.

I’ve caused this situation from the outset by selecting 2D5781 as the blue colour. According to the rather neat Color Schemer Studio which I’ve been playing with for the past week (it has a 15-day trial), this colour is not web safe. So if you create an image with this colour and then save it as a 256-colour GIF, the colour will be matched to the closest palette entry, not this colour. There’s more to it than that, though - here’s a good explanation of web-safe colours on the Web Developer’s Journal site.

Anyway, Constantin has been a massive help. So I’m almost ready to make the layout switch on my main blog. After a little further testing, mostly to make sure I don’t mess up the style sheet, and some re-ordering of the sidebar items (it’s a bit disorganized at the moment) in the blog, I plan to make that switch sometime later today.

So I’ve tweaked the font size for ‘NevOn’ in the banner graphic so this further layout is really a minor increment:

• NevOn layout: Release Candidate 2

Not wholly happy with how the words look in the banner - not as crisp-looking as I would like - but that’s the best I can do with Paint Shop Pro 8.

Sleep on this, decide tomorrow.

Thinking about what he suggests, I’ve now got very close indeed to what I’m happy with. Re-did the banner graphic with laptop-typing at the left now. I used a style sheet (style_1.css), edited the banner image location and file name and changed the alignment to ‘left’ rather than ‘center.’ The more I thought about how I re-did the banner, the more ranging it left seemed logical.

So here’s the new layout:

• NevOn layout: Release Candidate 1

Yes, I like the look of it taking up the full screen width rather than the narrow columns with lots of space either side. The only thing I don’t like right now is that ‘NevOn’ in the banner is too big, ie, font size. I’ll re-do the banner with the name slightly smaller.

Doing all this in Paint Shop Pro 8, which is all you really need for simple work like this.

He has some great suggestions for layout ideas for my main blog. He did more than just that, though.

Constantin took those ideas several steps further by actually creating some pages so I could see what they looked like:

I tried a couple of tricks for the layout of your blog. First, I tried to see if there’s a way to center the banner — and I found one. Please see:

The only problem I see with this approach is that the banner will stay aligned to the right, and it will not look so good on very big monitors (bigger than, let’s say, 1600×1200 px). But again, few people have such monitors right now.

In my email back to Constantin, I said I’d place these files within this experimental blog as I will be looking at them quite a bit, so rather than consume his bandwidth let’s consume mine.

The most interesting thing here to me is the use of style sheets. That hadn’t occurred to me. When I read Constantin’s email, I had one of those duh! moments. Of course - a style sheet. I think I was too wrapped up in the assumption that I couldn’t do a style sheet with my Plus service level on TypePad, as you can’t dive directly in to the HTML code in the template.

That’s erroneous thinking, as within the root directory of the blog, I see a file called ’style.css.’ It might be just a simple matter of uploading a new style sheet file to overwrite the existing one.

So I have plenty more to do now with this design experiment than I originally thought. But that’s cool!

This really is a massive help. Again, Constantin, thanks for your knowledge, skill and selfless help.

(Constantin was also my ‘design mentor’ when I first created a blog on TypePad, last July. He had some great suggestions that helped me understand how do some things on TypePad that would have taken me ages otherwise. A wizard!)