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Search Engine Panel’s New Theme
As alluded to in Sunday’s “Hectic Easter Weekend” post, I’ve been on the lookout for a fresh new template for SEP. This new theme, Bozzeny’s SIMSEK3C, was released just a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been busy customizing it for the past few days.
The main objective I sought to achieve revolved around more user-friendly sidebars. By editing the CSS file, some PHP modification (more on this below) and a 3-column design base, SEP now has flanking sidebars with nice section headings that really stand out.
Many changes were made to the original SIMSEC3C, but most notable are the fonts and colour. I’ve changed the fonts from the theme’s default “Trebuchet MS” to more readable Arials and Verdanas throughout the blog. The text in the top bar that lists SEP pages (Home, About, Lexi… - whoops, almost gave away our secret project) is now legible, instead of the tiny text in SIMSEC3C. Blues and a little bit of green was added to liven the theme up.
Tags: SEPA Rather Hectic Easter Weekend for SEP
I’ve learned over the weekend that migrating a blog to a new hosting service while being away from your computer is a recipe for disaster. You might have noticed some downtime here at SEP along with some strange error messages, and even non-existent RSS feeds! Not to worry though, as I’m now back at my computer and things are slowly returning to normal.
The downtime and strange error messages were a result of DNS propagation coupled with trying to add/modify new themes. I’ve browsed themes to the point where the Lorem Ipsum monster haunted me, but have yet to find a theme that fits just right. Chances are that I will be using a ready-made template and customizing it to my heart’s delight in the weeks ahead.
I hadn’t realized that my hungry subscribers were no longer being fed until I noticed a dramatic decrease in subscribers, or rather, until FeedBurner had issues grabbing my feed. It turns out that my .htaccess file disappeared while I transfered the blog over, which resulted in 404 error because www.SearchEnginePanel.com/feed/ didn’t exist. With any luck, this post will reach your favourite feed readers and inboxes shortly.
Tags: SEP