Tannishblog

To honor the anniversary of the blog moving to it’s own domain, I present to all three of my readers an honest-to-goodness 100% Tannish Design-ed blog template. Maybe this one will stay around for a while. I’ve build quite a few templates in the past few months, when I feel they’re as perfect as this, I’ll share them with the Wordpress community. Not this one, though; it’s my favorite.

The image is by the same people who did the the last one (the guy looking out over the foggy city.) and there’s a few variations out there by them of melted people. This image is so true to my personality: the music, the jeans, the leather chair and the black guitar - perfect.

And can’t we all relate to the emotional content in the image? We’ve all had days like that. Haven’t we, at one time or another, slumped into a favorite chair at the end of the day and *felt* like we were melting… Hence the name: Meltdown.

Yeah. You know the feeling.

I’m reverting to the old Wordpress template. I admit that I have yet the talents to design a better one. While I continue to experiment within the confines of the Wordpress structure and with the limitations inherent in a blog’s functionality, this will stay. Somehow, this template has the right… feel… Ambiance… whatever that I’m attempting to reinvent.

I’m reminded that a wheel is still a wheel however many times it is re-engineered.

Okay. Here’s another new blog skin (template) for Tb. As I continue experiments in the art, science and nit-picky details of web design, I discover a preference for dark backgrounds. Some argue that the look is unprofessional. I find it easier on the eyes, but then I tend to live in dimly lit rooms. Think of me as part wolf, part cave troll - or something.

This design uses the technique for creating those neat rounded corners that are so fashionable on blogs. Soon, I predict, the ubiquity of rounded-corner designs will become as passe as the big rollover buttons circa 1999, so I tried out a variation. The paw prints are more accurate than those I used previously - less cartoon-y. The colors came directly out of the photo thanks to a nifty little app called ColorPic, which lets me capture pixel colors.

Let me know if you like it. Feedback is encouraged. Who knows how long this one will remain until the next mad experiment. If you would like me to re-skin your blog, leave a comment.

…or “What I’ve Been Doing Lately Instead of Playing Computer Games.”

Blog themes never seem to hit the right spot. A consummate geek must modify. Blogger made the tweaking relatively simple, so I was able to create a new masthead in Paint Shop Pro (Photoshop is too pricey), and modify the blog’s colors accordingly. Playing with the structure was off limits, lest the aspiring geek noob break their site.

It wasn’t enough. Partly that longing to get “under the hood” led me to switch to Wordpress last June. The price was right too. Gotta love the free software groupies. My first peek seemed daunting, so I altered a couple color settings and left the template alone. All Wordpress templates are of high quality, so I was happy - for a while.

Working with the same site presentation over time gets weary on the eyes, and incessant curiosity and an attenuated slow season at work compelled me to dive into the CSS sites and read the Wordpress Codex (a lot of it, anyway.) Production themes, as they are called, involved a healthy dose of CSS, a smattering of PHP, a refreshening of my web standards knowledge, Paint Shop Pro skills, and installations of MySQL and Apache web server. Color schemes were limited because I felt obliged to use tan as a base - something about the name…

Ten weeks later I emerge wondering where all the snow went, proud of my finished fourth-attempt of a blog template (the other three will be done soon.) At least I think it’s finished… as much as anything like this can ever be complete.

I hope you like it. Feel free to comment.