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Well it has been a while since I even posted here but I’ve just finished installing a re-design which uses Andreas’ latest theme, Blue Sky, as it’s basis. I am also using this site as the demo for the theme so I shall go through the changes I have made to the original which you may find useful.

The site makes extensive use of the Pretty Photo light-box clone and the innerfade script which are jQuery-based. These are used to produce the “slider” on the front-page displaying my theme ports, the fade effect when hovering on a theme image on the Themes listing-page and, of course, the fade/light-box effects when hovering on the theme images on an individual Themes page. I use this same combination on Textgarden and a more detailed explanation of their usage can be found here

For the front-page articles and article listing pages I have removed the “meta information box” though you will still see it on individual article pages. I just felt it was a little too much for you to have my face repeating several times on a single page. Once is enough I reckon. If this were a multi-user site where author gravatars changed with almost every article it wouldn’t be a problem but as it isn’t… ;)

Also on the front-page I have restricted the article excerpts to 3 without any paging. The original theme has paging included for these.

Both the front-page “slider” and the “Themes” listing pages use the same permlinked <txp:article_image /> with no excerpt being displayed.

I have shifted the background-image from the #head selector to the body selector in the CSS to be able to use it for the full height of the page. The background image for the “slider” is a separate image which has been accurately positioned to make it appear to be continuous with the body image.

In the “footer” I have removed the category listing that would normally appear in column 1 of the original theme. It was quite a long listing and made the footer too tall for my taste. There is a category listing in the sidebar anyway so I’ve replaced the one in the “footer” by making column 2 a lot wider which I think has worked out quite nicely for the text I want displayed there.