I had been thinking for sometime that the blog was due a makeover, but just couldn’t be bothered to sort it out. Then last week I needed to move LibDemBlogs over to a new server, I planned to move the blog with it, but at some point in the future when I had some free time. Turned out that the old server needed renewing now, so the plan to leave the blog for a bit was turned into a Bank Holiday of coding.
Then with the blog on the new server I just got a white page. I had modified my old template over the years with some random pieces of code and one of them was causing an issue, hours of attempting to fix it resulted in no luck. In the end I decided to re-install WordPress from scratch (whilst keeping the old database) and from here I installed this new theme.
After all this I then discovered I had quiet a few duplicate comments in my database (possiblily from when I moved from Blogger to WordPress, or from Haloscan to WordPress). I deleted all of these, but then discovered around 70 comments weren’t attached to any post. Unfortunatly there doesn’t seem to be any way in WordPress to move comments from one post to another so I had to manual edit the database using mySQL queries as well as trying to work out which post from 2004-2006 people were on about.
Hopefully the backend to the blog won’t need much more work, and I can focus on making a few tweeks to the template in the coming days.
So, once the page loads, I can see ONE LINE of this post without scrolling. The “featured post” bit is somewhere between a third and half of the screen real estate.
I hesitate to say this, given the reaction I got from the last person I said it to, but perhaps the totatilty of your headers is a /little/ bit large? And the twitter birdie is ENORMOUS.
Which is annoying, as it’s a feature I’d really like—off topic comments begone foul fiends!
I like the general look, nice and clean, but the featured posts thing showing up in the top for every post is a bit OTT, puts the actual content too low down (and would be really annoying if I were on a mobile browser, whcih given your current feature is the sidebars thing…).
Maybe only have it for frontpage, or sidebar it prominently?
Heh, I had to reload as I got the spam free error message, appears Jennie’s said something very similar and prompted the spamblocker, our brains are too similar…
The theme is off-the-shelf. Needed rather quickly due to the whole one server expiring, the other giving a blank page but no errors.
Pretty much agree that the feature post/twitter bird is a bit too big, and once I get time either they will be left on the home page or removed completely. Part of the reason for leaving them there was to test the idea of “Featured” for LDV, which I have now worked out how to do.
At some point in the future, I’ll also put in the WordPress mobile theme that I have on LDV which I really like.
Might have to look in to creating / finding a plugin which allows comments to be moved from one post to another.