New themes

My old theme, [Journalized Blue][], didn’t *quite* survive yesterday’s [WordPress upgrade](http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/2007/08/15/wordpress-upgrade/). I’ve downloaded [Journalized v2][] (beta), but while I was at it I decided to go “theme shopping”. I was looking for a 2- or 3-column *fluid* layout–<rant>I **hate** it when web pages don’t display properly merely because my browser window’s geometry isn’t what the author expects!</rant> Anyway…

I found [Srini G](http://srinig.com/)’s [Fluid Blue][] theme. Nearly a perfect fit, it’s a two-column theme that’s truly fluid! (Lots of the “fluid width” themes on the [WordPress Theme Viewer][] are merely fixed-width themes that center themselves in wider-than-expected browser windows and pop up horizontal scroll bars in “narrow” windows. Oops! Ranting again…) It also supports sidebar widgets, which I’d like to fiddle with. Added bonus: version 1.1 is ultra-fresh, having been released a mere three days ago.

Now, in spite of the above rants, I found a fixed-width theme that I just can’t do without: [Dean J. Robinson](http://www.deanjrobinson.com/)’s [Redoable][] is *gorgeous*! I’m gonna have to see if I can hack that into a fluid layout. Even if I can’t fluidize it, I’ll keep the theme around just so I can gawk at it once in a while with a theme switcher.

Speaking of theme switchers, I stumbled across an excellent how-to for Ryan’s [theme previewer](http://boren.nu/archives/2005/03/08/preview-theme-plugin/) over on YGG: [How to work on your blog without anyone having the slightest clue](http://www.younggogetter.com/2007/05/24/how-to-work-on-your-blog-without-anyone-having-the-slightest-clue/). Granted, installing a WordPress plugin is easy: Upload to your wp-content/plugins directory, then activate via the Plugins tab on the admin interface. (Still, it would have been good to include those instructions in the plugin.) The thing I found very cool about Travis’ post on YGG was how he’s using the theme previewer to tweak/debug themes and/or plugins *without exposing the code-in-progress* to his viewers. Great thinking!

So now I’ve got some new themes to play with. I had to disable the old theme switcher, since it wasn’t working quite right under WP 2.2.2. “Fluid Blue” is the theme du jour, at least for the time being…

[Journalized Blue]: http://zed1.com/journalized/themes/journalized-blue/
[Journalized v2]: http://zed1.com/journalized/themes/journalized-theme-version-2/
[Fluid Blue]: http://srinig.com/wordpress-themes/fluid-blue/
[WordPress Theme Viewer]: http://themes.wordpress.net/
[Redoable]: http://deanjrobinson.com/wordpress/redoable