I’ve used the Journalist theme for a long time, and I still like it a lot. But I wanted to try my hand at modifying PHP code myself on a bare-bones blog theme. It took me the better part of the afternoon and evening, but I’ve finally got the site to where I’m happy with it.

Note: I know absolutely no PHP, so this was kind of an exercise in trial and error. Here’s the theme before I started tinkering with it. I got rid of the horizontal “about me” bar first, and then started playing around with the colors.

Changing the title’s color was easy, but the various links throughout the page are governed by seperate sets of code, and I still don’t quite understand each one. Something that was easier than expected was changing where the “Filed under” and “Tags” features appeared. They used to be at the top of the post, but I was able to separate them from the “post date,” “By” and “comments” features and move them to the bottom.

Overall, I like the new look, and mostly I’m just proud of the (minor) tweaking I was able to do myself. The more I messed around with the code the more it made sense, but I’ve obviously just started.

Related, but in a round-about way: I’ve decided to put both my delicious and Publish2 feeds on the site. I used to just have delicous, and I’ve been grappling with which service to use because I like them both. From here out, articles tagged with delicous will be interesting articles, and stuff tagged with Publish2 will be journalism related. Happy reading!