David’s Technical Musings

This is a very attractive theme, one I will likely switch one or more of my blogs to.  The author did a very nice job with the banner image - it looks like it expands naturally with a very well blended break.

EDIT:  As of today (9/20), I’m currently using an incarnation of the FallSeason theme on this site.  Stay tuned for an article on what I’ve changed.

Overall Grade: A

Things I like:

• Very clean look.
• Post headers have a box next to them to show where a post begins.
• Comments are supported on pages when enabled.
• Comments are displayed distinctly with alternating color.
• Category counts are displayed by default.
• Lists are displayed with markers properly.
• Blogroll links in subcategories are displayed in a separate list (although I don’t like how it is done - see below).
• Links to pages are displayed at the top.
• Blockquotes are displayed in a different color (although not shaded) and with a thick vertical border on the left.
• Outstanding photo banner that grows as the page width is increased.  It is very difficult to see where the edge of the image actually is.
• Nice RSS section on the sidebar when no widgets are added.  It displays the RSS icon next to each entry in the section.
• Author with link is displayed for each post and a nice author page is displayed when the visitor clicks on the link.  Beware, however, that you properly fill in the profile info for each user.

Problems:

• Number in front of comment header is pound sign (#) instead of number.
• The Asides drop-down doesn’t include categories without posts.  This means you have to create the first aside before you can select that category.  This took me a little bit to figure out.  I just figured that asides were broken.
  • I fixed this by replacing this text in functions.php:
    SELECT  * from $wpdb->categories WHERE category_count > 0
    with this:
    SELECT * from $wpdb->categories WHERE category(_count <> 0) OR (link_count = 0)
• RSS widget has both a title box and an RSS icon to the left of the title.

Things I don’t like:

• Could use better separation between posts.
• Comments aren’t distinguished from each other very well.  I would prefer alternating color shading or a border on the left of each.
• Blogroll entries are displayed in a single box titled Links with categories in a larger font.  I would prefer to see each set of links in its own box with the category as the title (i.e. with no Links title).
  • I fixed this by adding a style for the h2 tag in the sidebar.
• Blockquotes are displayed with a double-quote image at the left and then simply indented.  I would prefer to see a border or, even better, shading.
  • I fixed this by modifying the style for blockquote to not refer to the image to to display a border on the left.
• No distinction between visited and unvisited links.
  • I fixed this by adding an a:visited section the css file to show no bottom border on visited links.
• Images are displayed with a 3px margin and a border, which causes things like smilies to be displayed with a border and to take up too much space in the text when using the Smilies Themer plugin.
  • This was very easy to fix.  I commented out the img style and added the contents of that style to the other 3 img styles (img.left, img.right, and img.profile).
• You lose the nice RSS section on the sidebar when using widgets.

Wishlist:

• Highlight author comments so they stand out from the rest.
• Option to select image shown in the About section on the sidebar.
  • I added this feature.
• Use the nicetitle feature from the scattered 1.5 theme to display popup titles.