The Headway blog theme
For some time, the design of this blog has been rather boring, essentially just dark blue and white. It was running the fabulous Headway theme but only version one.
The reason for this is that I had had problems upgrading. Indeed I had tried to upgrade one day only to have the ‘visual editor’ (which is the way you change things on the new Headways) die on me. Leaving me no option but to go back to version one and re-do everything. The original version 1 does not have the visual editor which is why I was forced to stay with it.
However a friend told me that the most recent version is pretty stable with most of the problems ironed out, so I thought I would give it another go. It worked a treat.
One of the things I really wanted to do with this blog was to put a dark blue background between the main posts area and the sidebar. This can only be done (if using Headway) via the visual editor.
That done, I had great fun trying out all the different combination’s of colours and style options. Some of them looked pretty weird. However I liked having the title in a paler blue band right across the screen, and then somehow putting the home and about links up the top seemed to work.
There were a few problems to resolve however. My thumbnail for excerpts plugin did not work any more, and my excerpts were thumbnailless. Horrors! However a quick hop over to the Headway forum brought forth the information that WP 3 has the facility to put thumbnails in the excepts now itself.
An examination of the post edit page did indeed reveal a new thumbnail item at the bottom left. However I then had to go through the whole of the blog allocating thumbnails, which was a bit of a pain. But done now.
Then there were the next post / previous post links. I had put these in manually, into the single post editor page, but this page was now gone! However again the HW forum reminded me of the Headway easy hooks feature which allows you to put things into tricky places on the blog.
A bit of messing around plus a change of the code I had been using, and, bingo! The thing was done. I think it is important to be able to move from one post to the next on a blog.
So there you are. A new design. It should do me for a while anyway. What do you think of it?
