I am pleased to announce my first Wordpress theme called Atlantis. I created this theme for use with my own site (I was using it for the last 6 months or so), and got lots of requests to release it. It’s a dark theme that comes with the ability to easily customize the color scheme (it comes with six and you can easily create your own) and determine which of your pages appear as “tabs” along the top just by setting custom fields in your posts. I also threw in some custom navigation functions designed to tame large page lists and a recently updated pages notifier that inserts a subtle announcement at the top of the home page.

Since this theme has a number of options, please make sure to read the README file. I know dark themes aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re into it then enjoy!

Screenshot and download:
http://rogersmj.com/design/wordpress/atlantis

Please post any comments on the Atlantis download page.

P.S. No live demo right now, but I hope to get that up tomorrow. Must sleep right now.

Well, I finally wrote a Wordpress theme completely from scratch, and this is the result! I hope you like it; I’ve always wanted to design a dark theme, and I had this stroke of inspiration one day. The design was actually easy; getting it into the Wordpress templating system was not. I’ve always tinkered with other people’s themes, but never written one from the ground up. It was an experience, and I’m still not completely done. So consider this a beta test.

Those esteemed vistors who have been around for awhile (thank you, you know who you are) will notice the return of features and content absent since the downfall of 3xmk.com in early February. We have a polling system again (please vote!), and the popular Google and AIM Triton articles are back — but all the comments that were made on them are not, sorry. Make some new ones!

Also, a new feature: anyone can contribute to the site by writing their own news post. Once you click Save, it will show you that your post has been saved as a draft. At that point, I will go in and review your submission. Once I publish it, the post will appear here on the front page under your name. Cool!

Still to come: the Gallery will return, hopefully complete with the hundreds of photos that were in it before. Stay tuned.

Finally, I am collecting links for a list on the sidebar of rogersmj.com. If you have a web site and want to trade links (as in, I post yours and you post mine), let me know!

One final word about the theme…I’m using some unconventional tactics in this theme as far as page inheritance and titles go, because of the particular behavior I wanted. It did require a couple hack functions that work for me, but I wouldn’t want to release them to the world. And that’s fine, because before anyone asks: no, I will not release this theme. I’m sorry, but the whole reason I did this was so I could make my site look unique and still use Wordpress to manage it; I’d like to keep it unique. Maybe one day when I move on to another design…but not today.

Comment and let me know what you think!

Since I can never leave anything alone, and I never want to use the “default” style for anything (yet another reason why I make Blackberry themes), I have created a new design for my site. It’s intended to be clean and simple, which is good for both the users — simple equals easy — and good for me, because I have enough work to do without doing a complicated site design right now. So I hope you enjoy it, I’m still working out the kinks and polishing it up. Let me know if anything seems broken or amiss.