Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

So I started the WordPress “fan” site recently, WordPress Station, and recently got it its own domain. And while surfing around, I found an open source design that was a hack of Apple’s brushed metal design. There was a brushed metal theme for WP when I first started using it, but it’s disappeared. Not sure why, but I figured there might be a few who’d want to give it a run. Therefore, I’m in the process of porting it to WP, and have it in “beta” over at WPstation. Plus, I’ve been busy working with an upstart hosting company, and will begin offering a great deal on a basic hosting package VERY soon.
Now if I could only motivate myself to post over at cookingwith more…

Jacob Appelbaum?s weblog
Jacob’s blogging from Houston, where he and some other SF Bay area volunteers are trying to team up with volunteers from Austin and surrounding areas to set up a Low Powered FM radio. They have a license from the FCC, all the equipment, including a standing offer of 10,000 radios for the residents…the purpose, to easily disseminate information to the 10,000+ displaced New Orleans residents, now living in the Astrodome. Seems perhaps someone doesn’t want some “free speech” to trickle down to those that need it.
And I haven’t heard one cable network touch on this, though it seems the LA Times have half the story. Stay tuned.

I’m offering up an updated, beta version here.

So, as I’ve begun designing WordPress themes, I found the tutorial over at Urban Giraffe invaluable. They walk you through the dissection of the default Kubrick theme, how to strip it down to bare bones, and start with a blank style sheet. Now that I’ve done that a couple of times, I decided it would be nice to have all the work done, and be able to have all the template files cleaned, as well as a style sheet with all the divs and classes there, simply without the style.

So rather than changing an existing sheet, it’s a blank canvass or sorts, but kinda like a paint by numbers as well.
Bear in mind, I may have missed a few elements, and if you discover one missing, please comment. My goal is to have as thorough a starting point as possible. Also note, numerous additional divs and classes can be added, this is simply a starting point, but covers as much of the basics as possible.
One last note, this is not a theme, it is a stripped down version of the default theme, which contains all the templates necessary, as well as a style sheet that is missing the style. If you simply upload this “theme” and activate it, you will have zero styling, meaning no widths, no margins, no clearing. So please do not comment that the theme didn’t work, or does not appear properly on your site. This is solely meant for someone who wants to follow along with the tutorial, or who like me, wants some of the dirty work out of the way, and just wants to start styling a theme.

I’d love to see what people do with the Blank Theme, so please post a link to any new themes you design.

A final note, I eliminated the “narrowcolumn” and “widecolumn”, and wrapped everything in the div- wrapper, as Urban Giraffe did. I found it was much easier to create a theme that works in all browsers and platforms by following that concept.

The Blank Theme can be downloaded

So CNN has this feature in their afternoon politics show, where these two chicks are surfin’ the web for blogs and what’s being discussed about the current events. So I realize all they are really doing is searching Technorati for keywords. And though I know Technorati pulls categories as tags, a politics rant may not show up in a search about Tom DeLay. Thus, I installed a tag generator for the site (via a WordPress plugin, Jerome’s keywords) so that I can start adding tags to my posts, and possibly get some hotty on CNN to read my post on air. Is that not the most geeky thing to strive for?

It seems all the bloggers are doing it.