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I routinely look through the web for new themes that I might incorporate on one of my blogs.  I have pretty definite ideas about layout and functions they need to have, although more and more, if it’s reasonably close on those I can tweak the back end to perform like I want it to.

For me, one of the big attractions of a theme seems to be visual.

I can’t tell you the number of themes I’ve downloaded and installed only to go “ick – not me” and discard it. And then there are the ones that I’ve desperately tried to alter the graphics to make the theme more appealing to still go “EWWW! not working” and discard it. Is this something you go through, too? I would hate to think I’m the only theme-trier-on-er in the blogosphere!

I’ll admit that the graphics on this theme were not my first choice. They are in the “grunge” style which really isn’t me. I changed many of them to suit me, although the grunge flavor is still present to some extent.

Despite being something I don’t associate with the me I want to project to the world, there was something about this theme’s graphics that caught my eye and piqued my interest. That I’ve been able to make the tweaks and twitches to make it work for me is probably just pure dumb luck. But work it has and for longer than any other in the nearly 3 year history of this site!

I suppose since the theme author isn’t making an efforts to keep the theme compatible with new versions of WP, I need to begin searching for a new theme. And I’ll confess to looking in a rather desultory way, but so far haven’t even found one to try on.

If you come across any really cool themes, drop me a line — OK?

One of the most often complained of attributes that a website can have is autoplaying music.  Ever since it became possible to stream music from your site, some individuals use (and over use) this technique.

Most people I talk to really have issues with visiting a site and getting an earful of music.

But what about sales pitches? We hear ads all day long on radio and television, so is it unrealistic to not find them on the web as well?

I was reading an article the other day about enhancing your web effectiveness with sound. It talked about giving your website a voice — a real voice in this case. Using voice-over to deliver a message to your visitors that may be missed by only offering text. While text is necessary for rankings in the search engines, this article tried really hard to make me believe that my visitors would love to hear a voice giving them a short, but important message.

I’m thinking that no, MY readers would NOT be impressed by any voice giving them any information — no matter if it were James Earl Jones‘ resonating tones or the dulcet voice of Beyonce doing the talking.

Now it also talked about a sound logo — something like the Tony the Tiger’s “Grrrrrrreat!” but fitting for the website. Now they might tolerate that. MIGHT.

But all in all, I think using music, voice-overs or sound-bite logo files will not be the way of this website. Call it a personal preference of mine — I like my websites quiet and visual only.

Thinking on this deeper, though — for any visitor who is visually impaired, and who isn’t already using a screen reader, having the site be able to offer them the ability to hear it would be nice. Not sure exactly how that would work unless it could be done with CSS coding and some way for the site to “know” this visitor was visually impaired — maybe a special browser for visually impaired people.

What do you think about websites that open up with someone talking? Do you click off of them as quickly as I do? If I created a sound-bite logo for this site — say that played a 10 second something that wasn’t too loud, would that drive you away? Or could you suffer that in order to read my scintillating articles?

Well, it may end up being a question that ranks right up there with using a motorcycle jack — why would you?

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Upgrading your computer to accomodate new technology or new hardware can be done in a variety of ways, but I want to focus on the 3 most common and easiest to do by a non-technical user.

Too Little Memory

If you’re experiencing a slow down of your computer with regards to opening and closing programs, you may be undersupplied on random access memory or RAM. Having too little computer memory is one of the most common problems with today’s memory-hogging applications, but it’s one of the least expensive issues to solve.

You can’t just run out and by RAM. You will need to first determine what kind of RAM your unit needs and then determine if you can add more to it. Go to Start/Control Panel/System.  A window showing your operating system and how much memory you currently have is shown along with other information about your machine.

The next step is to either refer to your documentation or go to the website of the manufacturer of your computer to find out how much memory and what type your unit holds. My laptop is a Toshiba A215 and uses DDR2-5200 memory. It will only hold a maximum of 4 GB, so I’m at the maximum for this laptop, so can’t add more.

Purchase the correct type and number of sticks of memory, open your case and the memory is easily replaced by snapping out the old and snapping in the new.

Too Little Hard Drive Space

The next issue we encounter is where you have no more room to save files. You can and should archive files to portable media such as an external hard drive or DVD/CD. Email boxes are notorious for having too many saved emails in them especially ones with large attachments. Be sure to periodically go through your email box to delete those messages that you don’t need any longer.

Adding a new hard drive is fairly easy though. Most of the newer computers are using SATA drives so you need to find out what kind of drives your computer will accept. Older units used IDE drives and those are fairly cheap. The SATA drives are a bit more expensive.

Maintenance To Keep Your Computer Running Effortlessly

There are some rather simple maintenance tasks that you should run monthly that will help keep your computer running smoothly. Defragmenting your hard drive is one of those tasks and while the built in defragmenter works OK, there are 3rd party ones that work better and don’t keep you from doing other tasks while they work.

I use IOBit Smart Defrag – it’s a free and very weightless utility.

Cleaning your computer of temporary files is another way to keep it running smoothly. CCleaner is another free utility that works very well at keeping your computer free of unnecessary files.

If you’re having issues with your computer running slowly, have checked it for spyware and viruses then these other tips may get you back running smoothly and quickly in a hurry.

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I’ve been using this theme for over a year now.  It doesn’t look like the same theme the author created, but nearly 90% of it is all his work, so I’ve left his links intact and hope you will too if you decide to use this theme. It’s a very versatile theme that is easily customized. You don’t even have to know a lot of php to do it.

Upgrade Error

When I upgraded to WP2.8 the first thing I noticed was that I lost my categories. It took a bit of research on my part to discover how to fix the issue, but all-in-all, this was a very easy fix. I see from the author’s website that others are having the same issue, so I wanted to post the fix for it.

You must go into your theme header and footer files to effect the correction. It’s very easy to do from your Wordpress dashboard. Simply click Appearance, then choose editor. When that window opens, you will see a list of files to the right and you will want to choose the Header file first.

The coding for the Header file will be displayed in the editor window and you want to look for the line about 2/3 of the way down that reads:

<?php wp_list_categories(’exclude=1&orderby=order&show_count=0&depth=1&title_li=’); ?>

All you have to do is change the word “order” after the = sign to “name” (no quote marks though)
So your resulting code will read:

<?php wp_list_categories(’exclude=1&orderby=name&show_count=0&depth=1&title_li=’); ?>

Now do the same thing in the footer file. It’s exactly the same code, so you can just copy and paste it from here. Make sure you do not have any trailing spaces after that > sign or you’ll get another error.

Threaded Comments

Have you noticed that my blog uses threaded comments? Would you also like to employ this on your blog as well? No plug-in was necessary! Changing to threaded comments was not hard to do and the complete instructions are provided by my good friend Lyndi over at Nice2all .

Appearance Changes

You’ll note that I made some changes to the appearance. I removed the logo image at the top and replaced all the images with those of my own.

The logo image removal required a bit of tweaking to the Header.php file (that file AGAIN!).  All I did was comment out the call for the image in the division called “logo”.

So my code reads:

<div class=”top-header”>
<div id=”logo”><!– taking this out for now to see how it looks
<a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/”>
<img src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/images/logo.gif” alt=”logo”/></a>–>
</div>

And by doing that, it removed the header image and scooched the entire page up which gives my readers a bit more of my content to see at the outset.

Changing the images was by far the easiest change to effect in the template. I began by downloading the files from the site, then exported all the files within. I opened the folder titled “images” and proceeded to create my own based on the sizes of the theme images. I replaced each image with my own image of the same size and used exactly the same name and image format. I then re-zipped the file and named it VersatilityLiteCustom and installed it to my theme directory. It worked perfectly straight out of the box.

I also tweaked the size of the side bar and post areas as I wanted more post area but still wanted a side bar that accomodated two 125×125 ad boxes without crowding. This change required my going back to that editor pane in the dashboard and opening the stylesheet. css file (it’s the default file that opens when you select the editor, so you should be there anyway).

I changed the side bar from 339 px to 275 px in the following code:

#sidebar-contain{
	float:right;
	padding: 0px;
	width:275px;
	padding:0 0 0 12px;
	overflow:hidden;
}

Then in the main content section, I increased the size of the content pane from 519 to 575.

That code is changed to :

#content{
	float:left;
	padding: 0px;
	width: 575px;
	padding: 0 15px 0 15px;
	overflow:hidden;
}

The last change I made to the theme involved fonts and colors. Those are also done on the stylesheet and simple search and replace does the bulk of the work there.

Conclusion

So now you know all my little secrets (well except the one that involves Fenphedra) and can now incorporate them on your own version of Versatility Lite. Good luck and good coding!

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