Day 473: More WordPress Tinkering

The Howl theme for WordPress doesn’t work well with Asides; it generates them as whole posts instead of smallish blurbs wedged between regular posts, thus defeating the whole point of Asides.  *thbpft*  However, I like its 3-column functionality. 

Speaking of which, many newer 3-column WordPress themes forces one to install widgets, which I begrudgingly did last night … only to learn that manually adding and removing items in the sidebar.php file doesn’t alter the sidebars if you have a widget-based theme installed.  In other words, once widgets are installed, WordPress takes over and renders someone with my moderate level of WP development expertise unsuccessfully wading through PHP until dawn.  I don’t have the time to learn how to make my own themes every few months, by gum!  All I wanted was to use an off-the-shelf theme and make it work with my current sidebar blurbs such as Flickr, Library Thing, del.icio.us, etc.  Alright, come January, I will work on becoming official WordPress development royalty – because, you know, there isn’t work, Mardi Gras or anything like that around the corner.  (And then she wonders why sleep is elusive.)

I’ve also been fiddling with setting up VatulBlog subscriptions and taggers in everything from del.icio.us to Newsgator and from Digg to Newsburst, and incorporating them into the header rather than in the bowels of the sidebar.  Yay, Java and XML!

While working on a Christmas theme for this blog, fog, gloom and the humid chills descended on New Orleans, and has me yearning for June on the concrete rooftop of my ancestral home in Chennai and/or the skirt-and-tanktop weather of a New Orleans August.  In other words, I want a burnt-yellow sun to shine from a cloudless blue sky, hence the left turn to Hawaii in the theme change.  65 degrees may seem warm to you Great White Northerners, but this delicate flower thrives only in 90 degrees and 90-percent humidity.