Incoherent Scribblings

It might appear that the blog has been quite the last few days. Well, I will grant you that I haven’t posted as such, but believe me, behind the scenes it has been very busy!

It all started over the weekend when I decided that I was ready for a new spring theme. After I developed and uploaded it I realized that I still very much liked my old theme.

Now while I enjoy the writing aspect of blogging, another one of my hobbies is web design and I like to use my blog to experiment with new issues that I come across. When I wrote my New Year’s Resolutions one of them was to “learn .php.” When I thought about it I decided I didn’t want to learn .php as such so much as I wanted to learn to “skin” my site. I have designed lots of skins during the short (14 months) life of my blog and up until now I usually just replace the old one with the new. I have an archived copy of a couple of those designs on my hard disk, but I would like to be able to switch between my skins at random. Enter the skinning!

And that is what I have been doing the last few days. The first change you may or may not notice is that all of my files now end in .php instead of .html. If you have linked to one of my entries anywhere, please update your link. (The old .html files are still there for now, but I can’t guarantee I won’t delete them if I need more disk space.)

Then following this tutorial, I uploaded three skins “Whoopsy Daisy!”, the new spring theme… it should be the default; “Pink Plain Jane”, a simple theme modified from the Movable Type Template “Sakura”; and “Blonde Bubbles,” the skin you have been seeing for the past few months.

Everything seemed to go well creating my PHP switcher and inserting the code into my index templates that tracks cookies (that’s how it remembers which skin you choose), but when I tested it, the skins weren’t switching.

I cursed, I reread the instructions, I cursed some more, I looked at some other tutorials and tried some of those ideas, I cursed some more, and then finally (many, many hours later) I found this suggestion on some obscure bulletin board and it worked! If it wouldn’t have been so late (approaching 2 am) I would have ran outside and screamed! I was SO fucking happy!

I made the final tweaks this morning and now my site is should be skinnable! I think I finally have the kinks worked out, but would love it if my readers would choose one the skins in the left-hand right-hand column (Sorry about the Blonde Moment… for some reason I always get the two mixed up!) and leave me a comment or drop me a gmail if you come across any bugs.