Velvet Verbosity

Technical blogging behind-the-scenes crap is probably not what you came here for, but today, that’s what you’re going to get. Making this blog work isn’t as easy as it looks. Of course, being a creative perfectionist never helps in making things easy. I’ve been trying to find a template that I could be happy with while I built my own over time. There is no shortage of good looking wordpress templates out there, but most don’t work the way you want them to. The last one I had up here was very attractive, but really screwed with the formatting on several posts. I tried redoing a couple of the posts, but the template was stubbornly holding on to wonkiness, so I gave up and tried a couple more of the templates I had downloaded.

Changing the templates is actually a fairly simple process (as was exporting all my posts and comments from blogger) but frustrating. I put up a template, view the site, and WOW! That looks great, I think to myself. But wait? What’s this? Where did my blogroll go? Or, whoops, that first post looks great, but the rest look like I was drunk when I was writing them.

Template after template presents some sort of problem, ranging from minor annoyance, to “Holy crap, that looks like hell!”

I’m settling on this most recent template because it is by far the cleanest in terms of formatting, as well as easy to read, elegant and simple. However, I had to delete almost all videos because they were messing with the page code, which I can’t edit because it is using CSS style sheet coding as well as pulling content from, uh, somewhere. I think it’s a problem with the combination of a new template with imported content. Clearly the recent video I posted is not a problem. It wasn’t a big loss to lose the other videos, most were for laughs anyway, and they are easy enough to find on YouTube should I decide that my blog just wouldn’t be complete without them.

This is one of those templates that doesn’t like wordpress widgets, and doesn’t allow for the built-in blogroll which was so nice because I could have categories. I’m sure if I had the time, I could figure out the code and add it, but I’m opting to build it as a page instead.

I also had serious trouble installing my tracking code. That’s still a little messed up, so I can’t tell who, if anyone is visiting, unless they comment. Maybe I’ll just buy myself a Romper Room mirror so I can see you all by way of magic. “I see Lceel, and Larmster, and RJ, and and and…” Remember that creepy woman and her mirror? I watched that show during a brief stint in a daycare, and I remember all the kids leaning in closer as she began to name off names, and I thought, “If this woman can look through that television box and SEE me, I am so outta here.”