If you have been come to my blog before, you might be think­ing “What the…?” I have made a cou­ple of theme in the last few months, look­ing for some­thing that reflects who I am, but also doesn’t get in the way of what I am really try­ing to do with the blog — write and share my inter­ests. While work­ing on Carla’s site makeover, I found a pho­tog­ra­phy theme that I thought would be per­fect. In the process of updat­ing her site, I kinda fell in love with the theme and installed it on my site. For Carla’s site, the theme allows her to present rotat­ing full-screen images, as well as imple­ment rich-looking gal­leries. It’s clean. For me, the theme gave me the oppor­tu­nity to share some of my pho­tog­ra­phy on the main page, and dis­play some fun back­ground images on var­i­ous pages.

The love affair with the over­all look, for my site at least, began to fade when I started notic­ing some really buggy stuff going on with the theme’s code. The devel­oper, though rel­a­tively respon­sive, was not ter­ri­bly help­ful. He seems prone to declar­ing that any issues peo­ple encounter with the theme is due to users manip­u­lat­ing the theme’s style sheet. I have some cur­sory knowl­edge of HTML and CSS cod­ing, but I rarely touch the theme style sheets unless I am absolutely cer­tain of what I’m doing. One of the things that posed a prob­lem, on Carla’s and my site, was that the blog page wasn’t ren­der­ing the back­ground image for the main blog area. The result was a trans­parency that made it vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to see the text of the blog article(s). After beg­ging for some help, the devel­oper accessed the con­trol panel to Carla’s site and fixed the code. I copied that code cor­rec­tion over to my site and things appeared to be work­ing fine — with the blog slider back­ground, that is.

There were other buggy CSS issues that I expe­ri­enced with the DK theme. I noticed that the use of spe­cial char­ac­ters or ALL CAPS in the blog title weren’t han­dled well, and the title would par­tially repeat and quo­ta­tion marks appeared around the spe­cial char­ac­ters or all caps. This prob­lem mainly affected my “now THIS is fri­day music” series, but it was easy enough to work around. I just couldn’t use spe­cial char­ac­ters or all caps in blog titles. The real prob­lem was that the blog page back­ground wasn’t stick­ing. In the DK theme, you can use a sta­tic back­ground or chose a back­ground gallery. I couldn’t fig­ure how to change the sta­tic image that showed up behind indi­vid­ual blog pieces. Logic would sug­gest that it should be the sta­tic image from the blog page itself, but no! For what­ever rea­son, the theme revered to the sites sta­tic image, why came with theme and I couldn’t fig­ure out how to change. My work around was to cre­ate sin­gle image gallery that would show up behind sin­gle blog pieces. It was a pain in the ass to adjust those set­tings for every.single.blog piece, but I endured. In the last week, though, I started to noticed that the blog post set­tings would — on its own — revert back to the sta­tic image. Inter­est­ingly, the sta­tic image for blog pieces was a rotat­ing gallery of every image in my media library. That was not good! I haven’t seen the same prob­lem on the blog on Carla’s site, but she doesn’t post as much as I do so it’s hard to say that this prob­lem is not uni­ver­sal. As much as I like the visual pre­sen­ta­tion of this them, the weird back­ground image issue was the last straw. I had to change.

I have a num­ber of themes saved my Word­Press library, and I started to pre­view a num­ber of them Wednes­day evening. Maybe I was turned off by the expe­ri­ence with DK, but I shied away from sim­i­lar pho­tog­ra­phy themes. After pre­view­ing about five or six themes, I turned to WordPress’s own Twenty Eleven theme. In the past, I had skipped over the stock Word­Press themes because they seemed so basic. How­ever, Word­Press recently released ver­sion 3.4 , and a num­ber of the fea­tures in this update are quite com­pelling. I almost went with a writer’s theme called Eru­dite, but I came back to what you see here, the Twenty Eleven.

I think the main thing for me is to not worry, at least for for now, about style and put my focus on substance.

Over the past year, or so, I have come across a num­ber of blog­gers that I really enjoy. It occurred to me, while most of theme have visu­ally inter­est­ing sites, I keep com­ing back for the con­tent. Styl­ized sites might have be the worm, but the hook that snags me is inter­est­ing mate­r­ial. That’s where I want to take this blog. Con­tent. Con­tent. Con­tent. I want to shake off the “Who gives a damn?!” and just write. Of course, I will still post music and book­marks. Those things are part of who I am, or what I’m about. And that’s the key. I want this site to truly be a reflec­tion of who I am; stuff I think about; and pon­der­ing life’s ques­tions — big and small.

Thanks for read­ing, com­ment­ing, and sub­scrib­ing to, my site.