A new theme for a new year - only one week early.

I loved my last theme (actually, my last two themes - but the C64 one was a throwaway), but every time I make a new theme I learn something, and I wanted to incorporate some of my new skills into a new theme.

Claim Theme Screenshot

Screenshot of my latest theme - Claim

Inspired by my most loyal reader (hello dad!) I’ve created “Claim”, a theme to help me stake my claim to my peice of the web, that’s easier and clearer to read. It’s inspired by many, but fettered by nunn.

The Claim theme includes built-in support for these plug-ins:

  • Creative Commons Configurator - creates a licence that can be included at the base of your individual posts.
  • Link Summarizer - provides a list of the included links at the base of each post. Configured for printed pages only.
  • Ping/Track/Comment Count - Counts the comments seperately from the pings. Recommended for correct function of this theme
  • ShareThis - places a button for sharing the post in various social networks or via email at the base of each post.
  • Wavatars - an awesome plugin that creates a unique avatar for each commenter, or uses their gravatar if they have one.

Please bear with me as I tweak things around here, and if there’s anything you think I can fix, please let me know. As usual, I haven’t tested it on IE7 or earlier, so you might notice some wackyness using those browsers. I’ll sort that when I can.

Credits

Jon Tan(Jon Tan(gerine), designer and typographer) has an excellent site on design etc that you should visit (actually, his site is awesome and you shouldn’t visit ‘cause it’ll make me look bad). His site has a left margin for asides and captions which inspired mine. Hopefully he won’t mind me pinching his idea.

Tomorrows Laundry provided the blank theme that I styled and chopped up using TextMate(Top-notch text editing for the mac) and CSSEdit 2(Excellent CSS editing for the mac).

The Yahoo YUI library(link to Yahoo YUI) created the base CSS that this site is built on.

Update: 2008-01-05 Version 2.0 The “Claim” theme was not validating properly due to the Yahoo Reset, so in version 2.0 I’ve switched to Blueprint(Blueprint, a CSS framework).

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

– Blueprint CSS (Blueprint, a CSS framework) at Google Code

Today’s update also includes the Blueprint print stylesheet and some extra jiggerypokery thanks to Footnote Links(Build fancy footnotes for printed pages) created by Aaron Gustafson(Original A List Apart article by Aaron Gustafson on Footnote Links).

Update: 2008-01-09 Version 2.1 finally fixes the issues with the left margin caption/cite/metadata positioning. Now if the post markup is correct the page will render perfectly on every browser I’ve tested.

Update: 2008-04-13 Version 2.6 Introduces:

  • A tag page with tag cloud
  • Category page title and tag title integrated into page heading
  • Removed a hard coded reference to this site
  • Changed class “updatedate” to “date”
  • Improved the category/archive pages
  • Fixed a couple of img placement problems
  • Better compatibility for linux (fixed fonts)
  • Styled the RSS feed widget to match theme
  • Nicer sidebar styles
  • Tag links added to pages

Update: 2008-04-21 Version 2.7 Introduces:

  • A hard-coded about section, independant on widgets. The About section displays the Biographical Info found on your profile page on most pages, but on category pages, it displays info about the category. I may expand this later to include post excerpts.
  • Built-in support for the Link Summarizer(Plugin page for the Link Summarizer plugin) plugin. This produces a list of all the links in the post, and replaces “Footnote Links” that left numbers everywhere when styles were turned off. The list will only display on printed pages.