Where The Heck is Clay?

I apologize for not posting in a while, but some unforeseen difficulties have kept me away. I did manage to get a little background work done though, most of it being cosmetics on the blog itself.

I stripped all the standard code from the sidebar box templates in the theme editor such as Recent Posts, Popular Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. My reason for this is to make it easier to rearrange the placement of the boxes by using all Widgets. I had no problem physically moving the code around in the theme editor but if something goes wrong and I forget to save the original first it could get pretty dicey.

Instead, I can click and hold the mouse, and drag the Widgets around when I want to rearrange things without worry of messing anything up. I tinker by nature and can spend too much time when I could be doing more productive things so this is one little way to work smarter and faster.

Now I really like this theme but it is a free one and I’m sure a lot of people use it, heck, more than a few of my fellow Alex Jeffreys students are using it so I broke out my trusty colour spy tool and attacked the stylesheet in the theme editor. All you do is click and hold the eye dropper and drag it around the page to the colour you want and it shows the 6 digit code. To brighten things up and bring some uniqueness to it I changed the sidebar box background to white and simplified the colour scheme using the title text blue (003366) for all the borders, underlines, and the top toolbar, along with some sizing changes. Yup, there goes Clay tinkerin again!

To top things off I have something in mind for a banner so I’m going to enlist my Artist sister to draw up some stuff for me that I can submit to get graphics done. Some free outsourcing, yippee! I decided the plan is to have a logo made up for The Marketing Canuck (Canuck is slang for Canadian), that I can use for the Header, Business cards, eBooks and other Products, etc, etc.

One thing I had some trouble with was the Comment section. In my travels around some blogs I saw some nice looking setups that turned out to be Disqus, Intense Debate, JS Kit, and SezWho. These all look great and I ended up installing Disqus with the thought of the social benefits but I found it a bit cumbersome to use not to mention yet another login.

I lived with it for a while but began having second thoughts from things I read in the forums about Disqus having ownership of the comments and people losing comments after uninstalling. They have comment exporting but we are not able to import into Wordpress. Being worried about this I saved all my posts complete with the comments.

I uninstalled Disqus and deactivated the plugin and found I lucked out because I still had all my comments, a little messed up but still had them. I tried out SezWho since that system doesn’t take ownership of comments but didn’t like all the code changes required and I don’t want to have a bunch of extra work if I decide to change the theme. So I said goodbye to that.

Now I’m back to the default Wordpress comment system and simply dressed it up a bit with plugins. It’s not as pretty as I would like, but it works.

I tried a plugin called WP Captcha Free that not only didn’t work here, it stop the comments from working. It’s too bad cuz with this one you didn’t have to struggle to read the letters in the submit box that I find annoying. That’s OK though, Akismet does a good job of catching the spam and I just delete it.

Getting long winded here so watch for the next post real soon where I back up a bit after getting a bit ahead of myself here.

Cheers!

Clayton Moore – The Marketing Canuck

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