blogging

In search of the perfect blog theme.

~ Ron Walker ~ 31 Comments

My Eyes, are tired. There is a headache screaming to escape the confines of my cranium. I have spent the last two days testing, searching for a blog theme that has what I need. The conclusion? It doesn’t exist for me. Just give me something between simple, and versatile.

In years past, you could find a free theme, with a sidebar. Nothing overly flashy, yet not so simple that you couldn’t dress it up a little with plugins or widgets. WordPress 2011 was the last one I ever used that just worked. You could customize it with a few bits of code. Of course, back then they weren’t cranking out an upgrade to the core every few days.

Today, the theme ecosystem is just a commercial catalog of themes that cater to businesses, or those that need a website instead of a blog. Giant in your face banners (just go ahead and call them pictures). Nearly taking up two-thirds of your screen, before you even see the first post is the new norm. Twirly, flashy, fading in and out graphics. Then the despised popup blocks as you start to leave the site, or heaven forbid, while you’re just sitting there trying to decide if you like the posts.

Give me that Money!

Yearly charges anywhere from $25 to $55 or more, just so you can get the update, if one of the numerous upgrades of the core breaks your theme. No, thanks. It would have to be a hell-of-a good theme, fitting all my needs for me to fork over the support money. Already paying domain fees, and hosting fees is enough. Of course, we all saw this coming years ago.

What little blogging I manage to do, is for fun and sharing with others. I don’t have a business. I have tested around 30 themes, and they all come up lacking in my basic needs. Maybe I’m too picky.

Perhaps, I should stop griping and learn to build a theme myself, but I want to enjoy it, not work on it all the time. My theme I currently use, is “Graphene” It does most of the things I need.

Share what theme you use, why you like it. What you look for in a blog theme.

Thank you, my blogging friends.

~ Ron Walker ~ 44 Comments

On a beautiful Friday morning, I wanted to take a moment, and let you all know how great it has been to meet all of you. I can’t begin to tell you how my days have been brightened by reading your blogs. While I have been a very infrequent blogger lately, I do appreciate you hanging in there and not writing me off. You’re all a great group of bloggers from all over the world and I’m fortunate to know you.

March 2017 is when I found the WordPress community of bloggers. For four years before that, I’d been just using the software mainly talking to myself, with the occasional comment from family of someone that stumbled across the blog. Then one day I installed Jetpack to play around with it, and needed to register my site on the main WordPress. That is when I met all of you wonderful bloggers. So while I may be an infrequent blogger at this time, I still cherish all of you.

Stay safe, stay true. Above all, keep blogging!

Gutenberg’s logic, escapes me.

~ Ron Walker ~ 21 Comments

How many of you are using the Gutenberg editor. I have been using it for a few months now. I have watched it with fascination. While it goes through iterations of changes, like food through a goose. Like many, I feel it was rushed out as the new editor, sometimes even unusable for some projects. It has matured more, but there are things that still leave me scratching my head. The mobile app for it was not even ready for prime time, when they released the editor to the masses.

How many of you are using it? Are you having trouble with figuring out how to do something? I have had a few things crop up

How to add a graphic to your post, and wrap the text around it, is not intuitive for new users.
Also, for some odd reason, and I admit I don’t know how long it has been changed, but to schedule a post for publishing later, has changed from a simple task, to one that makes no sense at all.
Before, you had a blue “edit” link next to the schedule label, this let you set when you wanted to publish your post. Now that is gone, and the only option you see is “immediately”.

I’m sorry. If I want to publish something tomorrow, at a certain time, Immediately is not the option I would comfortably click on. What in heavens name, was wrong with leaving the edit link. But I guess they thought it was less cluttered, and we could read their minds.

So now, you click immediately, even though your not wanting to publish it at the moment, and it brings up a window to set the date and time in the future. Is that logical?

Maybe it’s just me. The new editor is getting better, but still a long way to go. Oh, and while we are here. Anyone know how to change one word, or selected words to a different color? All I get it to do, is change ALL the text in the block to the color.

Comments welcome.