This is my first serious expe­ri­ence with Word­Press. I have been impressed by some of the fea­tures and frus­trated by others. When I first installed Word­Press, (which is made amaz­ingly simple by my web host, Dreamhost) I was con­cerned about what would happen with the posts I had on my existing blog on Google’s Blogger ser­vice. For­tu­nately, Word­Press is able to import posts from a number of dif­ferent blog­ging sys­tems. All I needed to do was autho­rize Word­Press to access my existing blog, and all of my posts were imported. So far, I have not seen any errors in the posts that were brought over. I had coded most of my Blogger posts, so that might have mit­i­gated the poten­tial for difficulties.

Set­tling on a design for the blog has been dif­fi­cult. I didn’t want to go with the design I already had. It was made to be simple and effec­tive but it was not ter­ribly inspired. I don’t know that I’m very happy with the new design I have cre­ated, but at least there is a con­cept behind it. I use a blog to prac­tice artic­u­lating my thoughts and opin­ions. I believe that ideas don’t truly con­dense until they are expressed. Expres­sion, either spoken or “written” makes the amor­phous mental ener­gies take on a struc­tured form. In this process, the person expressing the ideas has an oppor­tu­nity to eval­uate those thoughts from an external per­spec­tive. My con­cept, expressed in the typog­raphy of the title is about joining the dis­parate ele­ments of thought.

Finding the infor­ma­tion regarding Word­Press tem­plates that I needed to exe­cute my design was a little bit dif­fi­cult. The Word­Press Codex is not nearly as bad as the awful Drupal doc­u­men­ta­tion, but it is not the most user friendly resource. Even­tu­ally, I was able to iden­tify most of the files I wanted to edit (these are in the wp-content folder under themes). Starting with the right default Word­Press tem­plate def­i­nitely helps. I wanted some­thing simple, so I began with the “Clean Home” tem­plate devel­oped by Mid Mo Web Design. My design is not really sim­ilar, but their design had all the parts I wanted and none of the cruft. From there, it was simply a matter of throwing out their CSS and writing my own.

Along the way, I also had to edit some addi­tional stuff, including the HTML for the default wid­gets and some of the Word­Press tem­plate tags (specif­i­cally the cal­endar tem­plate tag). Those were more dif­fi­cult to find, but the core Word­Press files are mostly within the wp-includes folder. Dig­ging through the PHP code (much of which I don’t under­stand) I can usu­ally find the places where PHP gen­er­ates HTML. For some reason, the people who wrote Word­Press like to use Euro­pean quotes (some of which look like small arrows) as direc­tional icons. It irks me when someone does this (although I’ve done it before for clients) so I really wanted to remove them.

There is still a bit of work to do, but I am happy with my progress. One ambi­tious project is to create sev­eral dif­ferent color schemes for the blog that can be ran­domly selected when a page is viewed. I went with a monotone color scheme – exe­cuted pri­marily with CSS – so I should be able to create sev­eral dif­ferent color sets that can be applied using jQuery or MooTools. I also need to tweak the style of some of the post meta­data and the sidebar blocks.