bezmotivnik

> Basically make sure it’s the same size.

The original one is just a piece of centered text. Minimum.

The one I wish to use has the typical graphic header w/text overlay.

* your theme must have a call to <?php wp_footer(); ?>
* at the very bottom right before the </body> tag.

In which file?

My footer.php has that, so I’m cool?

Thanks for that link; it’s good and I see a couple that have some promise.

The aesthetics can be tarted up (but ONLY to the point of not impeding fast conveying of content or visual ergonomics), and will be; it’s merely that I’m looking for a clean, basic, single-column theme that lends itself to a very compact vertical layout of one-line description/links in the style of RW. I don’t want or need much more.

From that point, we can start whittling on making it “prettier.”

I haven’t done a WordPress blog before and to save time would like to start with a theme as close as possible to what I eventually want as my finished product. Because it is not obvious to me as a new user which themes on the themes page are functionally closest to what I want in terms of what can be most easily modified to fit my needs, I’m asking for advice.

Scrolling is minimal _per content_. A daily visitor will never have to scroll _at all_ except to reach archives.

Beauty is function and efficient access to significant content.

And thanks for your help.

> Is this too simple for WordPress?

I guess that’s a “yes”?

> I have a feeling you might be looking at Tony Street’s
> website theme, not the Blase theme he offers on his
> website.

His stuff is badly mislinked all over his site.

The theme that shows in the thumbnail on the link I posted is what I have. I actually wanted something else on his site, but the download was mislinked to this theme. Very confusing! What I have has the “Blase” graphic in the left margin.

> yes you can make the theme sparse and have short excerpts
> showing for every post (use template tag: the_excerpt
> instead of: the_content).

Good! That’s very helpful. I was thinking there would be a method of designating the post’s “title” field in the WP editor as the “excerpt,” but that doesn’t appear to be a supported feature — though it seems like a good idea.

> it’s just how efficient you are with your words. Write
> short sentences. Make short titles. It will take up less
> vertical pages.

Descriptive and succinct titles are a must (vid. Barger), and I am good at that — but in the articles themselves I want to be able to write at a higher level again. Having spent the WWW years writing for an increasingly subliterate and rebarbative reader, I found that instead of merely writing more clearly, it has resulted in a dumbing-down of my copy so severe that it has actually resulted in making me dumber and my abilities blunter. I was writing with the sole object of making my ideas so simple that they weren’t liable to misconstruction even in the face of the hostile, delinquent stupidity that characterizes current net fora.

> they tried to get more views by mis-categorizing their
> themes. 1 column is supposed to mean 0 sidebars.

You should check out that category — the majority do not fit that description. Some even boast “two-column.”

> Most people think a blog is not a blog (it isn’t alive)
> without comments.

I don’t want to get too sidetracked here, but I was in Internet discussion fora nearly every day between 1984 and 2006 — when I quit because I could no longer stand trying to deal with the noise from kids and gristleheads. Most of the serious people I knew from the old days quit years ago. Gresham’s Law is real. The only reason I am putting up a weblog is to make some higher-order data available on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Believe me, I never want to see an unsolicited comment again, even if it’s just to delete it.

OK, so what I wish to do relative to that is eliminate the “Comments Off” and “Filed Under:” lines from the articles list as they serve no purpose and take up vertical screen space. I haven’t found anythingin the Codex yet about that.

Thanks for any pointers!

OK…I know relatively little about PHP, though I’m able to putter somewhat knowledgeably in HTML with some CSS.

The closest thing I can find to what I want (with quite a few changes needed — at least eventually) is Tony Street’s Blase.

At least the scripts are small to begin with.

I think I can lose that side graphic by reducing the .PNG to a black line (maybe) and I’ve found a description of how to lose the text headers in the codex, but I don’t see how to insert the graphic header banner yet.

> header with “a horizontal menu” (fairly common)

Yes, that’s it, that’s what I want. Exactly. Right under the header graphic I’ll make.

> I don’t get what the “toilet roll” effect is, please
> explain.

Scrolling for miles, like unrolling toilet paper, which is the curse of blog design, typically. Two screens are about as far as a typical user will scroll before quitting or at least becoming annoyed — according to expensive research and my own unscientific observations. I want to keep this efficient for busy readers.

> You can make your index page have a list of just the post
> titles, and clicking the title takes you to the full
> post.

Yes, that sounds exactly like what I wish to do, a one-line description/title, with the post still coming up with the same header and layout as the index page, so it can be provided as a convenient, free-standing external link for e-mailing or hotlinking which will always appear in the context of my blog. That’s my objective.

> Usually ones without a sidebar are called “1 column
> themes”. Try searching on the themes site for 1 column
> themes.

Strangely, almost all of the ones I saw did have the sidebar, which made me think I didn’t understand the “1 column themes” terminology properly. A couple I thought seemed promising had bad links or were not rigged for WP2+.

I thought I’d better ask before proceeding.

> Disable all the Comment options in the Admin. Every theme
> has Comments built in — but you can easily delete that
> section of the theme, if you don’t mind getting your
> hands dirty.

I’m assuming that if it doesn’t visually disappear from the site when switched off, then comment functions are in a fairly clearly marked module in the code which can be excised or commented-out.

[Personally, having comments active on a blog has always seemed analogous to inviting dogs to dump on your lawn.]

> other people would doubtless recommend that you go to the
> Themes site, and pick a 1-column theme that looks similar
> to what you want. Then spend the time to hack the index
> to only show what you want, and delete what you don’t
> want.

So, just drag it up in a third-party WYSIWYG editor and start tweaking and whacking chunks off of it? [gulp!]

> Hope this helps

I think it will. I’ve been dreading this undertaking for at least a year, because I have always had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted in a blogsite but didn’t want to have to code it from scratch as my frustration level is probably too low for that.

Thanks for your help; I’m sure I’ll have lots more questions!

Not to be mean, but I agree; noise-on-load ought to be a felony. It just screams, “MYSPACE!”