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Io's Auroral glows - image courtesy of Wikipedia

All of us who blog are sensitive to our theme. We chose it because of certain attributes about it.

For some, it’s just the color scheme, graphics and overall layout that have us using that particular theme. For some, our blog platform has a lot to do with the theme we are using which then dictates what attributes we have on it, but more and more platforms support similar attributes to each other.

Being a blogger has made me aware of other blog’s themes. When I visit a blog, I tend to not only read the content I came there for, but like a potential home buyer, I look around at the carpeting and drapes and see if the furniture is laid out the way I would like it if I were going to live there.  If I see something interesting, I put it away in the back of my mind so the next time I iterate a theme  on my own blog, I can find as many of those cool things as I can to incorporate on my own blog theme.

It’s not quite keeping up with the Jones’ but sort of.

That’s exactly how I got the theme I’m using now. I saw it being used somewhere else, liked it, saw the link to the developer at the bottom and navigated over to download it for myself. I was lucky that it was a free theme.

One of the first things I did was convert each graphic to the color scheme I wanted to use (the original graphics are blue and grey) and change the key graphics to those of my own. Then, with a lot of help from my theme developer friend, Lyndi, I tweaked other aspects of the theme so that it had those attributes I wanted.

Most recently, she helped me change the comments to threaded commenting. That’s new to WordPress 2.7, but this theme didn’t yet support it and I just think it makes more sense as well as making it easier to follow a conversation to have the comments threaded.

I just saw something over at Jason Massie’s blog that I found really neat. I don’t think Jason’s blog platform is WordPress — more than likely it’s a Sharepoint blog but I also don’t think it would be too hard to incorporate this on a WP blog either.

So, just in case you didn’t immediately pop over to Statistics IO to check out what I’m talking about, or didn’t spot it right away, I’ll tell you what it was that caught my fancy — over on the right, there’s this floating set of icons that when clicked, change aspects of Jason’s blog. The first three icons change the layout a bit. The last set change the font size aspects. I don’t know exactly why that caught my fancy this morning, but it did. I don’t know when Jason added that to his blog because I’ve visited it before and don’t remember seeing that little floating bar.

What little thing has caught your eye lately on someones’ blog? Do you do like me when you visit a blog and check out the look and feel as well as read the content? If you notice a change, do you leave the blog owner a comment on it?

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