A while ago I promised that all of my currently-available themes would be updated to version 1.0 by January 1, 2008. Today is January 1, 2008 and not a single one of them is at 1.0. I did start the process, and make noticeable improvements. Carter’s Line, BWO, and BWO_one are now all at 0.80.
But that still leaves BWO_space and BWO_doodle behind. And it leaves some problems I have with the current 0.80 releases intact. So I can’t declare success on this goal, and I don’t foresee being able to do so today.
I do have a number of excuses to claim for my failure. There’s of course the unexpected holiday chaos (which I should probably expect by now), my recent decision to start a new blog, and the fact that I simply found the updates — a rather tedious and dull activity because the errors across these themes are very similar — too boring to spend much time on.
None of these excuses count for much, and so perhaps the most important point is this: I will have the updates done ASAP, and certainly no later than January 15. The penalty for not making that deadline is death.
Because they’re easier than working on a new theme, I’ve whipped up a few more variations to BWO. The first, is BWO_space (demo here), which focuses on white space around the content. It’s rather interesting as an idea, but the execution’s far from perfect. The second is more pedestrian. It’s called BWO_invert (pictured above; demo here) and it’s BWO with, you guessed it, the colors inverted. Neither of them are very radically new or interesting, but I can’t seem to stop creating simple variations on my first theme.
Having been pretty satisfied with my recent modifications to BWO, I decided to move ahead an whip up a simple modification to it. In about 90 minutes, I assembled BWO_one, which is essentially a single column layout. The links normally in a sidebar are now in the footer. This allows there to be even more focus on your content. And, being something whipped up in 90 minutes, don’t forget that BWO_one probably still contains a few uglies — uglies I’ll try my best to remove in the future.
UPDATE: I’ve decided to move Ikiru to BWO_one, at least for a little while. I just feel like showing it off.
I’ve released my first WordPress theme: BWO. It’s currently at version 0.42, the first one available for public consumption, but probably not the last.
BWO is a simple theme, and the only currently being used here at Ikiru. As you can see, its got just three color (black, white, and orange — the source of the name), one font (Georgia), and no images.
We’re now presenting this site on the BWO WordPress theme, designed by us (well, really me, I’ll drop the corporate we). This is certainly not the final version of the theme, but it’s a demonstrative one.
The beautiful picture at left was one of (not the first) that I found when searching Google for “black white orange” which, as you may have guessed, is what the BWO is in this theme’s name stands for.
BWO is a very simple theme. It contains no images, displays only one font (Georgia, for better or worse), and uses only three colors “black,” “white,” and “orange.” That is to say that there no HEX values in the stylesheet (you can check if you like). These parameters were meant as both a challenge and as a good set of training wheels for the bike of WordPress theming (admittedly, a bad metaphor).
Because this is my first theme, and I’m sure it’s still missing a number of things, I’ve not declared it complete. But it’s a nice place to start.