The finished product - Omer's Scratching Post

I have been a big Thesis fan for a while now. It makes blog design so easy that almost anyone can do it. Thesis, by itself, looks pretty good. This blog is basically bare-bones Thesis. I really want to change things up here, but haven’t had the time to actually figure out what I want it to look like.

Not so with my other blog (or should I say my cat’s blog?) Omer’s Scratching Post. Omer is basically the mascot of The Pet Wiki, and the Scratching Post is a place for him to share his opinions, talk about pet related issues, and to let people know about stuff happening in his life and on The Pet Wiki.

Recently I’ve been making some big changes. At least the changes look big. With a few custom modifications to Thesis, everything looks great. You can make these modifications in the css and php in the custom folder that Thesis provides, but you don’t even need to do that. Just add the Thesis OpenHook plugin and you can edit the css and php directly from WordPress.

After you install the Thesis OpenHook plugin, you’ll notice some new menu items under Appearance in the left menu. We’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s start by trying to customize the background of your Thesis theme. DYIthemes, the creators of Thesis, do a great job explaining how to do just that. They give you a whole starter kit and walk you through the steps. The only thing that I’d change about their instructions is that instead of making modifications to the css and ftp’ing it back and forth, you can modify the css by clicking on Thesis Custom Styling in the left menu. It’s much more convenient to use.

For Omer’s Scratching Post, I wanted add a custom graphic of my kitty and his scratching post. The first thing that I did was create an image to use. I’m working on a budget and I don’t do all that much graphic work. Instead of buying a copy of PhotoShop (which is excellent software for creating graphics,) I opted to use Paint.net.

Paint.net is one of those little known, but very useful applications. It’s a very powerful image editor and it is absolutely free. If you’re nice, you can donate money to help out these very talented developers. Think of it as good karma to do so.

Now it’s time to create your graphic. Figure out how many pixels you’re using for your columns, and make your graphic that width. I chose to make the height on the graphic 200px. You can choose whatever suits your site best. I layered a few pictures of Omer (and you guessed it) his scratching post. I added a bit of text and viola! New header created.

The following brilliant information and css code comes from Logos for Websites:

Now that you have your image you’ll need to ftp it to the correct place on your site. OpenHooks can’t help you here. Upload it to /wp-content/themes/thesis_15/custom/images.

Click Thesis Options under Appearance in the left menu. Make sure that “Show site name in header” and “Show site tagline in header” are checked under Display Options, Header. If they’re not, select them and click the “Big Ass Save Button”.

Now we can go back into the css and modify it to use your new image. Click Thesis Custom Styling and add the following:

/* This line sets up our clickable background image based on the site title’s link */
/* DIY: Adjust the height & width attributes to reflect the actual size of your image */
/* DIY: Change the filename of your image to reflect the actual header’s file name */
.custom #header #logo a { display: block; height: 200px; width: 928px; background: url(‘images/YourImage.jpg’) no-repeat; outline: none; }

/* This line gets rid of the site title & tagline by casting them out to far left field */
.custom #header #logo, .custom #header #tagline { text-indent: -9999px; }

/* This line collapses the vertical space of the tagline so that there isn’t unnecessary white space after the header image */

/* This is a bit of a kludge, but it seems to work. */
.custom #header #tagline { height: 0; }

/* This line removes the padding from the header so that the background image sits close to the nav menu, the bottom border of the header, and the sides of the content */
.custom #header { padding: 0; }

That’s it. You’re all done. It’s amazing the dramatic results that you can create with very little work. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that you got it up in running in an afternoon instead of a week.

I’ve been having fun. To set up my blog just how I like it, I’ve been looking for useful widgets to add. There are a ton of great ones out there. Here’s a list of my favorites:

• Akismet – Spam is a huge problem with any blog. The amount of spam seems to grow every day. Akismet does a wonderful job of separating the good from the junk. It is a must for any blog. Akismet comes bundled with WordPress and only needs to be activated. You can get an activation key from WordPress’s site.
• Add to Any: Subscribe Button- Originally, I was looking for a widget that would allow people to subscribe to my blog by email. The Add to Any: Subscribe Button gives me that and more. This allows readers to get new posts in a bunch of different ways. It goes beyond RSS and email and updates subscribers by Twitter, Facebook and more.
• All in One SEO Pack - This is another no brainer. I bought the Thesis theme for the SEO benefits. If there is another tool out there that can help with with my Search Engine Optimization, I’m in. This plugin allows me to set tags I want per post to get the best optimization possible.
• Dandy ID Services – I want people to connect to me in as many ways as possible. Dandy ID is a plugin that puts all my social media accounts in one place. It doesn’t take up a lot of room and the icons add a bit of color to the page. The only caveat is that you need to create an account on Dandy ID. It’s worth it. One thing that I would like would be to add a title to the widget. Maybe in the next version.
• StatPress SEOlution – I like to know where my traffic comes from. StatPress SEOlution gives a wonderful breakdown of where the traffic comes from. The charts are beautiful. The metrics are understandable, which is more important than anything else. Very well done.
• Sociable - I’m a sharing kind of person. If I see something I like, I like to tell others about it. I wanted a widget that would make it easier for people to share the information that they find useful. Adding Sociable puts social media links on each post, taking away all barriers to sharing.
• Twitter Widget Pro – I am a heavy user of Twitter. Twitter is an amazing tool to connect better with people. I want people to know what I’m doing on Twitter, and Twitter Widget Pro is the best widget out there. Everything is configurable. I run multiple Twitter accounts, and this is the only widget that allowed me to install multiple accounts on the same sidebar. It looks great.

There are a ton more wonderful widgets and plugins out there. These are my favorites for now, but the best part of plugins is if there is something that you’d like, wait a while. Someone will develop it. Ask on the forums. If you come, they will build it.

Update: A couple of things that I forgot to mention is that all of these plugins are free. They also can be easily installed from inside WordPress – no ftp client need. Enjoy!

Deep breath… My blog is now on renareich.com. This is a big step for me. I am now in full control of how the blog will look. It’s very exciting. All that I needed to do in the end was (under tools) export the blog as xml and then import it into the new blog. Piece of cake. The whole thing took less than 10 minutes and I now have a backup of the blog as xml on my hard disk.

There are still a lot of things that I’d like to do to the way it looks. I’ve added a bunch of widgets to help out with a bit of the customization. I’ve added my picture, my tweets, tag cloud, archives, etc. Some of these things I was able to do on the old blog, but some are completely new. I’ve been trying to get more into the social media aspect of the blog. See all that those icons below this post? If you like what you see, share it with your friends. Look over to the right. If you’d like to see what else I’m up to, check me out on FriendFeed or Facebook or LinkeIn.

The next customization of this blog will probably be the header, background and fonts. Although all the information that I want is now showing up, I’ve only done a partial facelift. Now it’s time to get colorful. It should be fun.

I’ve been playing around with a number of themes on the new blog site – I want to have it up and ready before I do the big switch – and it seems like Thesis wins out. I’m one of the cheaper people out there, so for me to plunk down $87 for a theme is a big deal. There are so many free themes out there that it just seems silly to actually cough up money.

Why did I decide to use Thesis? The clincher for me was the SEO enhancements that have gone into the design. It’s the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) rule. The less clutter on the page, the better chance that Google has to indexing it. That’s key. Thesis does just that – it keeps the html code clean.  I could make the site as pretty as I want, but that won’t bring traffic.

There are plently of other bells and whistles that come with Thesis, like the ease of modifying the page layout and the ability to set font and font size from drop down menus. That’s cool. I’m still playing around with it to understand the full power of the theme. I’m sure that I’ll have more to say about it when I have more experience playing with it.

I did it. I made the decision to move my blog to my own website instead of writing on WordPress’ site. It was a hard decision to make, but I knew that I had to do it eventually, and now is as good a time as ever.

I wasn’t able to get the domain name renalive.com – it’s not being used, but someone owns it. I tried to contact them to see if they’d be willing to sell it, but alas, no response. I’ll be using renareich.com. It’s not as cute as Rena Live (I always really liked that name,) but it’s all mine.

I’m using GoDaddy for hosting. I’ve been surprisingly pleased with the service. It was really easy to set up and install. So far, that’s all I’ve done with it. I’ll need to export the database from renalive.wordpress.com and import it into the new database that’s been set up.

I’ve been debating about what theme to use. I’ve heard such wonderful things about Thesis, that I’m pretty sure that’s the way that I’m going to go. I’m doing a bit more research on what I need to do, and I hope to be up and running soon. The reason that I’m at all hestitant to use Thesis is that I like the idea of being able to just install something that looks pretty and not think about it. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have to come up with a design, which scares the heck out of me. It’s a learning process.

In my Digital Storytelling course, they introduced me to Wordle. Here is the Wordle for this blog: