I tried once before to try and change the theme on the site but it didn’t work out so well. This last weekend I was poking around because I was still very dissatisfied with what I had. The problem was with how wide the main content section was. On the old design I was limited to using only sizes up to the Flickr small picture size. If I used a medium size picture it ended up poking over into the sidebar on the right.

Flickr Image Sizes:

Thumbnail

Small

Medium

While poking around around noon on Sunday I discovered the faleonis theme by flisterz. I looked at a number of other themes too but was fairly impressed by faleonis because it was clean and it used XHTML 1.0 Strict as the doctype. Nice. I pulled down the theme and started customizing it.

Note: When it comes to my private blog I’m a lazy bum… well that and the fact that there are only like 3 regular readers means I am definitely not worried about making production changes on the live site. If you were checking the site Sunday afternoon you would have slowly seen the changes go live.

Then, in order to finish customizing it I had to replace some of the functionality that was built into the previous theme. Here are the Wordpress plugins I added to get the job done:

• AdSense Manager - The Blix SEO & Adsense theme I was using before was great from a one stop shop perspective, but from a customization standpoint I hated it. It felt like trying to de-tangle cooked, sauced spaghetti. Fortunately the AdSense Manager plugin was an easy solution to keep earning minimal revenue from my 3 regular readers. There is of course some coding required to get the ads in the right spots (for a while I had a hideous youtube video ad unit poking out on the right sidebar).
• All in One SEO Pack - Next, the search engine optimization. This plugin is a winner. Install and enjoy.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - This one is an upgrade. I didn’t have this functionality before but had been thinking about using it for a while. FeedBurner provides a lot of really useful functions and features for subscribers (and for authors) when it comes to providing feeds so it made sense to migrate to a solution rather than trying to keep up with changes and new feed features myself.
• Google Analyticator - Another upgrade. Another easy install, at least if you already have a Google account. Really really cool reports on usage.
• Intense Debate Comments - Another upgrade. Much like my reasoning behind going with FeedSmith I wanted to provide a better comment experience, but I didn’t want to have to keep up with changes in the industry all on my own. So, after a little research I ended up deciding on this solution. I have no idea if it really is the best or anything… but I’m not expecting a lot of comment traffic so as long as it can deal with one comment per month I think it’ll be fine

And there you have it. I’m sure over the coming week I’ll keep making small changes to it.

Leave me a comment on the new comment system if you have any feedback