Launching My Wife’s Blog & Playing With The Thesis WordPress Theme

Now we are a two blog family. My wife, Lorna Harris, now is blogging over at Calif Lorna. I spent a few years here on Daggle talking about life in Britain from the perspective of an American. Now she’s doing the flipside, looking at being in America as a Brit!

It’s also the second blog I’ve launched within a month. Behind The Scenes Of The Greg In Hollywood Launch covered a lot of the technical backend stuff I was involved with to get a professional, journalistic-oriented blog up-and-running. I thought I’d share a few more details of what I did with Lorna’s personal blog. Note that if I don’t explain something, such as the FeedBurner Feedsmith plug-in, that’s because you’ll find it already covered in the post about Greg’s blog. So read that, too!

As with Greg’s blog, we went with Tiger Tech for their great and incredibly low-cost hosting and WordPress for its ease of installation. Unlike Greg’s blog, we didn’t dive into doing a major design. Instead, this was going to be a straight-forward “take-an-existing template and personalize it with a logo” operation.

That’s where the Thesis Theme for WordPress came in, from Chris Pearson. I’d heard both Rae Hoffman and Michael Gray raving about it on Twitter, so I checked it out. I liked what I saw with the screenshots — lots of options to customize many things about the look-and-feel without having to know coding. Nice, bring it on.

I bought a copy and dived in (I went for a developers license, so I can use it on as many web sites as I want — gotta kid who wants to blog next). Immediately, I was impressed with the ability to choose between 1, 2 or 3 columns — and control the size of the columns all by using control panels.

Another thing I loved was the ability to insert “widgets” into the 2 “sidebar” columns I ultimately went with. There are preset widgets, such as the ability to insert a Search box, a Recent Post display, Recent Comments and more. This is wonderful. With the few themes I’ve played with in the past, inserting or removing this stuff involved getting into the template code. With Thesis, it’s a toggle on or off process. And want to change the order of widgets? You just drag them above or below each other as you’d like.

There’s also the ability to use the “Text” widget to insert anything you want. For example, I wanted to have Lorna’s Twitter feed appear in her sidebar. I selected Text, then inside the box that appeared, pasted the Twitter HTML widget code into the box. Voila — Twitter on the blog, no plug-in needed nor any editing of template files required.

Similarly, I was able to make a custom “Subscribe” box by simply using HTML code to link to some of the options and adding the FeedBurner email subscription code that it provided.

I put some AdSense on the site using the Text option — why not. But this was an area where I wanted Thesis to provide more support. I felt like it should be an existing widget. In fact, I wanted not only too have standard 1, 2 & 3 column formats but also formats to insert AdSense (or other ads) at the top of pages, bottom, across multiple columns — you name it.

Let me say — some of this might be there, and I haven’t looked hard enough. One intriguing feature is the “Feature Box” option that can put a standing unit in the content column, above all columns or at the top of the entire blog. You can also do it just for your home page or sitewide. But I didn’t play with this, as it involved messing with a Thesis “hook” (more on that later), and I had plenty of other work to do.

Another disappointment was that with the Search widget, you’re stuck with “To search, type and hit enter” as the standing text on the box, with no easy way to alter it. I’m sure you can by editing some files, but since so much is already made easy, I want it all easy. I’m greedy! The font I went with meant all that text wouldn’t fit unless I expanded the column more than I really wanted. It works for now, though.

There was plenty more to love with the customization, and I’ll just bullet-point some of the options I was able to control within the theme’s control panel:

• I could show only the site name in the title tag, not both the title and the tagline (but you could do that, too)
• I could insert a custom meta description tag for the site’s home page
• I could set the text to encourage people to read the rest of a story when only a summary is shown to whatever I wanted
• I believe it makes using the Feedburner Feedsmith plug-in unnecessary if you provide it with your own custom feed URL. I haven’t double-checked this, so I’m continue to run both, at the moment.
• It gives me a nice navigation menu at the top of the page where I can add any page or category (but annoyingly, I cannot add a link to a master archive or master category page — though later, I can create these pages manually and link them)
• I could easily insert tracking software for Google Analytics (and more, if I want) but entering it into a single box that in turn tucks it into the footer of all pages.

One of the main features of Thesis is the “Multimedia Box,” which shows images that rotate (if you want that). You can draw images from your own server or pull from other sources — if you know the code. I liked the box providing a nice visual resource for the site, but I was frustrated I couldn’t control the size or color form a control panel. There’s other ways to alter it, but that requires getting into some files (again, more in a bit).

For Lorna’s blog, I pulled from Flickr — using tips I learned from Chris Pearson ages ago (see Adding A Flickr Photo Stream To My Blog). I so wished this was somehow built into the multimedia box and that it could make those pictures bigger than the stream’s standard API allowed. Or if I was going to make use of the ability to have Thesis use pictures on the bog, I wanted it to allow me to upload them directly from within WordPress rather than having to FTP them across. I can FTP — anyone can with minimal instructions. But I’m lazy, and it’s a pain. But it’s working well enough, for now. The Flickr pics flow in, and everything even nicely resizes if the pictures change from horizontal to vertical.

One of the biggest disappointments — a huge oversight for a theme that makes so much so easy — is the inability to control the blog’s logo from within a control panel. I mean a custom, image-based logo. If you want to get fancy with just text, then Thesis rocks. But someone ages ago — I think Jennifer Slegg — said one of the easiest ways to make a blog stand-out from the crowd if you’re going with a common theme is to just slap your own logo on it.

Lorna had one (her Welcome to Calif Lorna post has more on this), but it was down to me to figure out how to get it into the site. The logo was made a year ago with no particular thought of it flowing into some standard template.

Me, I wanted to upload the logo within Thesis and have it automatically resize it and place it according to various choices. Instead, I had to reduce to a standard width then read Rae’s awesome post, Thesis Tutorial – Hooks for Dummies, to figure out how to edit a key file and get the logo in place.

I got it there, in the end. I understood even some of what Rae broke down about how “hooks” work. But like her, I had an initial “I’m scared” reaction when I saw these mentioned at all. I still don’t want to see them. I want EVERYTHING to be through a control panel.

At the very least, if I have to edit a file, I want to be able to edit that file using an interface in Thesis. Amazingly, unless I completely missed it, you have to edit the key files and then push them across via FTP. I think this makes life harder for some of the same non-tech people who are so saved by other aspects of Thesis.

My edit different from Rae’s in one key way, this line, at the bottom:

add_action(’thesis_hook_before_title‘, ‘add_header_image’);

See, I had told Thesis not to show the site’s name in text in the header — or really, that is, as the big headline text at the top of every page. That’s because I had a logo that was saying the same thing. But I did want to have a tagline in text come under the logo, at least originally. So changing to say “before title” rather than “after title” meant that the image logo was placed before the site’s title text. And since that text was disabled, it meant that the subtext/tagline came right under the logo.

I also wanted to center the logo, and fortunately I found this guide that provided the code I needed to put in my custom.css file:

.custom #header {text-align:center;}
.custom #tagline {font-weight: normal; color: #888; text-align: center}

That centered both the logo and the tagline nicely. Then Lorna didn’t decide she liked the tagline showing, so I disabled that. But at least I knew how to center it using Thesis for the future!

That custom.css file is also where I set the body background color and the border. It was pretty easy. I followed the tutorial on adding custom backgrounds, then just altered the code to use two colors from the logo that I thought would be OK.

That’s my big tip for the color challenged, by the way — me, the guy who needs Garanimals for adults, because I think gray and brown look awesome together. I don’t get colors. But if someone does a logo, they probably do — and the colors in the logo look good together. So choose your link or background or other colors from the logo, and you’re good.

Back to Rae’s tutorial, I used that to alter the footer of pages (but again thinking I wanted a control panel to do this). I thought about using what she explains on adding social media buttons to the bottom of each post, but instead I just went with the Add The Any Plugin to do that without having to touch code at all.

Thesis has a lot of thought put into SEO issues, but there are still some issues I caught out of the corner of my eye. I need to look more closely at them.

For one, it inserts the new canonical tag into every page, as best I can tell. Plus, I think initially it wasn’t doing this correctly. I think that’s fixed now, and giving it a very fast look-over, things do appear good. Given that WordPress spits out pages in a variety of different URLs (stop doing this, WordPress!), the tag (which is still a “hint” to search engines) doesn’t hurt. But I want an on/off switch for these types of things.

Another issue is that I’m pretty sure it’s tagging all pages as robots=all, which is unnecessary. For the long answer, see Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More). The short answer, it’s like putting a Post-It note on your chest reminding you to breathe. Forget to look at that note? Well, you’re going to breathe anyway.

The problem with this is that there are some particular pages I don’t want indexed. I think there’s a way for me to flag these using some custom header insertion options using Thesis, though when I tried, I didn’t see them show up. And if they had, I’m pretty sure I’d have had a page saying to both index it and not index it (and in that case, the NOT should win — but you still don’t want to confuse things).

One more issue was nofollow being slapped on links without me being asked, like links back to the home page. I’m guessing the idea here is to do a little link sculpting (see Sculpting with Nofollow Works Pretty Darn Well and Sculpting your PageRank for Maximum SEO Impact). Well, I want that choice, rather than it being decided for me.

A final issue I caught was that while Thesis says there’s no need for things like the All In One SEO Pack, since it does many of the same things that plug-in does, I didn’t see that Thesis was automatically making meta description tags. Again, I haven’t given some of this a very close look, but still after several checks, that did seem to be the case. So I kept All In One running, specifically with only this option enabled.

While I’m being critical, I am in love with this theme. I know Chris, and I can see so clearly that more and more of it is going to improve and give me all the customization via control panels that I want. I just want it all now! But I’m so happy to get so much of it already.

In case you’re wondering, I will move Daggle onto it in the near future (and the migration to WordPress will help with the commenting here, too). But that’s a big job, as I’ve got lots of post and comments that need to come over. Plus, I might want to get the logo and design tidied up a bit.

A few other things. In Rae’s review of Thesis below, she wishes it had built-in support for contact forms. So do I. But Tiger Tech has super easy contact form script you can use. So if you host with them, you just copy the form into a WordPress page on your site, and away you go. And so I did for Lorna’s site.

Also, no site’s happy without a favicon. How awesome if Thesis helped you here, from making it to uploading it. Ya gotta do it manually. So get yourself over to Dynamic Drive’s nice FavIcon Generator. Give it an image, and back comes a nice favicon. Then FTP that to your root directory, and you’re done.

I’ll leave off with two other Thesis reviews: A Review of the Thesis Wordpress Theme from Rae last August and Thesis Theme for Wordpress Review from Michael Gray earlier this month.