Comments on: New Theme Active

By: Mike O

Mike O — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:13:49 +0000

Yeah, I tried to change it up a lot, change the colors, add my own things, take out the top links, etc., to try and make it my own.

But as you said, it may require more work.

By: jfc

jfc — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 07:05:08 +0000

Thanks for stopping by Mike,

The threaded comments seems to work fine with it.

I’m working on some additional changes but they aren’t ready to deploy yet, maybe in the next few days. I suspect more blogs are going to be using this theme so making some cosmetic changes might be a good idea.

By: Mike O

Mike O — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 06:31:45 +0000

I’m glad to see you got the threaded comments plugin working, I may switch to it as well soon. I had it on the old one…wasn’t sure how well it would work.

By: jfc

jfc — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:49:30 +0000

Hi Jason,

The main changes I made were disabling the video and Flickr components that I wouldn’t be using the same way, adding in the Voxant and Google video units and doing some other things with ads. Javascript based ads were the most difficult problem.

I also had to work some with load speed and I’ve gotten that to what I’d consider “just OK”. I’ll probably do some more work there.

I’m considering making changes to the base font and color as well, just to set OpTempo apart from other sites using this theme.

As for making the change, I have a test system that mirrors my actual content so that I can program and test everything there first then upload the changes to the theme folder here. That makes it a lot easier to deal with.

By: Jason A Clark

Jason A Clark — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 07:04:28 +0000

I think this is one of the better themes out there right now so I’ll definitely be watching with interest to see what changes you make. I don’t envy you, though. I’ve been thinking of changing mine for a while now but can’t bring myself to dedicate the time or energy.

By: jfc

jfc — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 04:49:32 +0000

Thanks Ivy,

I’m going to be playing around with it some more, that’s for sure. As a programmer, I can’t resist tinkering. I kind of like the faint line drawn by the comments so I may try something like that.

By: Ivy

Ivy — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 04:40:01 +0000

Hi, I think the new look is snazzy

Just a small note: You might want to draw a vertical line or give some sort of light color background to the right column to separate it from the main page on the left…

But it doesn’t really interfere with the reading, just makes it a little “busy”.

By: jfc

jfc — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 18:59:18 +0000

Hi Justin,

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for creating such a nice theme.

On my test site I still had the “pop effect” even without the ad and video units so it may be just connection speed or something I accidentally changed. I may play around more with what I’m loading to optimize it better. I mostly do back end web programming in VB.NET/C#/ASP.NET but I do know some PHP and CSS so I’ll see what I can come up with.

Oh, and if anyone asks your theme does work with Brian’s Threaded Comments (obviously since I’m using it here). Some themes don’t work well with it.

Thanks again.

By: Justin Tadlock

Justin Tadlock — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 18:18:00 +0000

Of course I like the look. Just stopping by to thank you for using the theme and writing a post about it.

You mentioned the tabbed navigation can be slow to load sometimes. This is unfortunately a limitation of our Internet connection speeds. To get it to load faster, remove some of your content you have on the page. You definitely have a lot going on here. It doesn’t “pop” into place until all content is loaded. I hope this helps some.