The Atahualpa theme has been active here on the site now for several days. I haven’t received any positive or negative feedback, but I’m happy enough with it now that I’ve made a few minor tweaks.
- The banner pictures at the top are now my own photos: I plan on adding in a few cat pictures at some point, but the format requires some fiddling so it may take me a while
- I’ve corrected some problems that prevented my archives from showing up
- I have managed to get a twitter feed working that doesn’t require the Flash plugin
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There is no really profound reason for this change, other than I wanted to try something different. The Atahualpa theme by BytesForAll [1] is a bit unusual as far as WordPress themes go: this theme lets me make changes from the WordPress admin panel rather than by manually editing the code files themselves. I’m still getting used to this way of doing things.
One of the instigating causes for my decision to change to a different theme was my search for a Twitter feed plugin. Changing the theme didn’t make this any easier, but since I was messing around with my site’s configuration anyway… well, it is flawed logic, but it’s what I have to work with.
I would like to point out a couple of things about the twitter feed on the right side of this page.
- For those unfamiliar with how Twitter [2] works, some of my tweets may look incomplete- like you are only hearing half the conversation. That is in fact exactly the case: if the tweet includes an @<name> (e.g. @ majornelson), that is a response to something <name> said in one of their tweets. My current twitter plugin doesn’t link you directly to the tweet I’m responding to- I’ll keep looking for one that does: for now, you can click on the @<name> link and see all of that persons recent tweets and from there will likely be able to figure out the context
- Another thing to note is that only my most recent half dozen or so tweets are showing in the feed to the right of this page. If you click on the title of that feed, you’ll go to my actual Twitter page: from there you can see all of my tweets if you desire
- Tweets often include links, but you’ll notice they might look funny: for example, http://bit.ly/4QGRO [3], instead of a normal lengthy URL. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, so there are a bunch of URL “minifier” services like bitly and TinyURL to shrink them down via redirections. If you click on the funny little link, you’ll be redirected to the full URL
- You will notice my tweets end with “From <something>”, like “From Tweetie” or “From TweetGenius”. This indicates what client I used to create the Tweet; TweetGenius [4] is the client on my BlackBerry, Tweetie [5] is the one I run on my Macintosh. If it just says “From web”, that means I entered it directly from the Twitter website
You can expect that I will continue to experiment with the twitter feed settings and appearance- at the moment, I’m just happy I was able to make it look partially acceptable without using a Flash interface.