Urban Giraffe

Personalising a blog can require patience and perseverance. There are times when it seems a fruitless task and the blog absolutely refuses to do what you want, despite your best efforts. There are many sources of information on the internet, but it can be hard to locate exactly what you need.

One of the simplest solutions is to look at other people’s work and see if you can make use of their ideas. This is the third part in a series of articles concerned with the dissection of the default WordPress theme, Kubrick. The hope is that walking through this theme may provide help for your own blog or, at the very least, open up new areas of research. After all, there is no shortage of information out there.

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Everybody has some musical cheese that they secretly enjoy. Beneath our oh-so-cool exterior beats a heart of wobbly glam-rock horrors, '70s cornball, and New Romantic meltdowns. We're born with this stuff so why fight it?

Having lived in the Czech Republic for nearly half a year I now realize that a great percentage of the Czech population are not afraid to show their love of kitsch music. I am sure a great underground scene exists here, somewhere, but the stuff that gets piped on the radio and in shops and other public places is firmly rooted in 80's hair-rock and power ballads.

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I watched two movies at the weekend and I still don't know what to think of them. The first was Roman Polanski's The Tenant. I've not watched many Polanski movies and even though I enjoyed my flat-mates story about meeting him at a wedding last year, he was always someone I heard a lot about, but never quite managed to see.

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Web design is a notoriously tricky subject. Often we give up any thoughts of innovation when the process of realising them is such hard work. Part two of this WordPress dissection continues to try and explain the basic workings of the software, how this relates to the layout, and how anyone can personalise their blog.

The focus will be on finalising the basic layout from part one, and then finishing the header and footer sections. Both of these are important as they stylistically define a blog and act as visual focal points – do it well and people will want to read your blog, do it badly and they may not even bother.

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They say that technology is converging and that our gadgets will soon do much more. I'm not sure who they are, but it seems to be true - mobile phones can take photos and play games, computers double up as VCRs, and even fridges are online.

My apartment here in the Czech Republic is a fine example of Czech architecture, and is lovely and spacious. It's got most of the modern conveniences I could want, except for a telephone line. I have a mobile phone, but it’s very expensive to call my family back in England, and just as expensive for them to call me.

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Stefano Aglietti has done an amazingly quick job of translating Dissection of a WordPress theme into Italian, over at the Italian WordPress site. I've added a direct link from the article itself. Very nice work Stefano!

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I came across a series of photos at Notes From A Desi Geek that show the amusing-yet-interesting cultural oddities in India. One thought led to another and I arrived at the conclusion that the blog is the perfect vehicle to show all my international oddities discovered on my own travels. I think I am developing a hobby in this respect, as this follows on from a previous post about the best onions in China. Still, photos for amusement sake are fine by me (and I so wish I had a photo of the Chinese shampoo 'Ugly Girl').

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Yet more WordPress activity. This time I've organised my collection of hacks and made a seperate plugin page, available from the navigation menu. Now I can contemplate the calm and zen-like organisation of the rest of my life.

The plugins are:

• Jump-To - Direct navigation from multi-page posts
• PageView - Embed an webpage inside a post
• HeadSpace - Manipulate meta-data

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Life as a WordPress blogger has become remarkably easy. If you can hold a mouse and follow instructions then you're most of the way towards carving out your own niche on the internet. A fresh installation gives you a powerful and attractive system with minimal effort, and with a little luck you can be blogging in under half an hour.

Despite the availability of hundreds of themes, and the general goodness of the default Kubrick theme, sometimes you just want to give your blog that personal touch, and the only way to do this is by going under the hood and having a look around.

A month in to running a WordPress-based website and I find myself doing the very same thing. None of the themes were exactly what I was looking for, and after investigating the internals of WordPress I realised it was a lot more involved than it initially appeared. I could certainly imagine a beginner being overwhelmed by the mass of acronyms and incongruent technologies.

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While I appreciate the cultural significance¹ of a band such as New Order, I was never much of a fan. Their music often sounded like it was made on a cheap Casio keyboard, or was the recorded drone from a tinnitus patient. There was never any incentive to investigate further, and this was reinforced by many years of suffering World In Motion - some say the high-point of English footballing music, but as I do not care for football then it just compounded my distaste for the whole subject.

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