New theme. Again.

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Submitted by varun on Sun, 08/01/2006 - 8:50pm.

There. I did it. A new theme. Again. Seems as if I am spending more time tweaking my blog than actually blogging. If you are seeing something very weird then flush your cache and reload the page. In IE and Firefox you can do this by pressing the Shift button and then clicking on the refresh button in the browser's toolbar. Oh.. of course... those you of reading this in a feed reader or an email please pop out of there and check out the blog's brand new avatar.

This new theme is still christened madz. madz is simply too cool a name to lose. So the old theme becomes madz_old and this new theme is ... well madz. This theme is still a work in progress. There are few more things I want to play with but I don't have the time right now so I uploaded whatever I had completed.

I wanted the new theme to be a lot more 'warm'... a lot more personal. Something that you can identify with. With this aim in mind I have used more colours in this theme. Most of the colours are easy on the eyes. If you find some colour too jarring just let me know (leave a comment to this post) and I will consider changing the colour to something a bit more soothing. And did I tell you that the layout is tableless? I wanted to keep the font size big enough to be easily readable so I have used something bigger than most blogs/sites.

Those of you using the evil browser called Internet Explorer might face some problems with this theme. If your browser window is not very wide then the blocks on the right will fall off and will appear after the main content. This is a major bummer right now. I tried to quickfix it but I am no CSS guru so the fix will have to wait for some more time. Designing for IE has been a big disappointment. I am not happy with how the blog looks in IE. In IE most of the fonts look good only below a certain size and that was a constraint in choosing the font.

Hmmmm... Am I forgetting anything? Feel free to let me know (in the comments) if you liked this theme or not. Do you have improvements in mind? Any weird quirks you see?

Chalo thats all for now. See you later.

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18 comments

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Liked the previous one better

Submitted by Sahil (not verified) on Mon, 09/01/2006 - 11:18am.

Hey varun I liked the previous one better this one seems incomplete. Specially the place where you have given your intro. That looks disjointed. and the color also dont seem to match up. As in it looks as if they were picked out randomly, they dont complement each other). Well in short, I like the previous one better ;)

Also add the verification for comments so bots like that steve guy dont spam you with comments.

Always the rebel

Submitted by varun on Mon, 09/01/2006 - 12:36pm.

I always look forward to feedback from you because you have a different way of looking at things. I can rest assured that you will tell me something that probably nobody else will tell me.

The disjointed look for the intro is actually deliberate. I want it have a separate look and feel from the rest of the blog. The site name, site slogan and the introduction use a shade of red/orange to convey a sense of warmth... sounds corny? Maybe it is :-)

When you say that the colours don't match up are you referring only to the introduction part or to all the colours? I wanted the different sections (header, main content, sidebar, footer etc.) to have slightly different basic colours to distinguish them from each other. That way even a one-time/new visitor can make out the sections at a glance. But I will definitely try out slightly different shades of those colours and see if I can come up with something better.

Tell me 1 thing. If you were reading a post on my blog do the colours distract you? Is it easy to ignore them if you want to?

I am not using a CAPTCHA for comments right now because:

  1. Drupal does not have a simply CAPTCHA module (weird, huh?). There is a module but it requires manual patching of some files (difficult to maintain and difficult to apply since I myself have applied some hacks).
  2. The CAPTCHA generated definitely had some problems since often even on entering the correct word it used to fail. I could never pin down the problem and therefore could not troubleshoot it.
  3. Visual CAPTCHA might cause accessibility problems, for vision-impaired users, for users using a mobile device etc. At least in principle I want my site to be accessible to as many people as possible. Therefore in the future as an academic endeavour I will see if I can come with a more accessible CAPTCHA.
  4. Search bots go crazy on seeing the CAPTCHA image. They think it is some genuine image never realising that it is a dynamically generated one-time image. They keep crawling the site and keep adding the images to their index. Right now Yahoo! bot is generating a lot of 404s on my blog since it is looking for images that don't exist.

I am looking into how to tackle the spam problem. I will evaluate Drupal's spam module when I get some time. I might also ask some of my regular readers to become voluntary moderators to help me deal with comment spam (*HINT*).

Chalo boss. Looking forward to more and continuous feedback from you.

Oh btw you might also be interested in this post that I made in the Drupal forums.

More feedback

Submitted by Sahil (not verified) on Mon, 09/01/2006 - 1:09pm.

Ok now I understand why you gave it a disjointed look but if you are trying to add some sense of warmth with the orange/red color scheme then I think you should add a pic too. Nothing like a pic to make it more personal.

And instead of generating pics randomly maybe choose one which has red/orange as the prominent colours so they blend with the theme. Also like the suggestion of one of the users in Drupal forums about blending the colours.

About colours not matching up what I meant to say was they diffrentiate the look too much. It looked like modules taken from different places and put together. They dont blend with each other giving it an uniform look.

And no the colours do not distract a suer while reading. About that CAPTCHA thing sure you can work it out. Hate getting into technical details about bots crawling sites and all.

Well thats about it for now. will post more if anything comes to mind.

Realtime feedback

Submitted by varun on Mon, 09/01/2006 - 1:22pm.

Arrey wah! We have having a near-realtime chat :-)

I agree with you 100%: nothing like a pic to make a blog more personal. I had tried to incorporate a pic into the introduction but I was having lot of trouble getting it to align properly with the text in all browsers and at different resolutions. It is on my to-do list and hopefully you will see it soon.

I really like your suggestion about using a pic that can blend in with the introduction. I never thought of using a single pic and was hell bent on getting a randomly selected pic to display nicely. Will have to dive into my photo collection to find a good pic.

I am also considering adding gradient images to at least the block titles. This way they will blend in better with the rest of the site. Problem is I have no idea how to make a nice and lightweight gradient image. But will definitely look into it.

When I was replying to you it occurred to me that I could 'box' the blocks the way these comments are boxed. I especially like the look of my comments (they have a different background colour) and was thinking of doing something along the same lines for the blocks. Whadya say?

Realtime chat interrupter (aka Wife)

Submitted by Sahil (not verified) on Mon, 09/01/2006 - 2:26pm.

Sorry for the late reply. Was on call with nams ;)

Yea I like the idea of boxing the blocks and giving them light background colours. That way one can even differentiate them and blend them nicely with the theme.

No problem.

Submitted by varun on Mon, 09/01/2006 - 3:02pm.

No problem. I can understand :-)

Am going to Ahmedabad today. Will be there till Sunday so all major changes to the theme will have to wait till the subsequent week.

Chal take care. Post a comment here if you think of something else.

boxing does not look nice

Submitted by varun on Tue, 17/01/2006 - 5:05pm.

I just tried boxing in the blocks but the results were quite ugly. The blocks when shaded drastically decrease the whitespace and draw too much attention. Green (unlike blue) is also not a nice colour if you want very light shades. Very light shades cannot be displayed and fall back to white.

Later on when I get the time I might try swapping the blue and green colours, i.e. green for the main posts and blue for the blocks. Maybe the boxing will look better then.

boxing does not look nice ...

Submitted by Sahil (not verified) on Wed, 18/01/2006 - 11:51pm.

.. unless you can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee ;)

Hey I checked out the current site on my work PC and it did not look bad. On my laptop (which is a Toshiba chinese special) the colors seem odd and doesnt look good. But on my PC it did look good. So sorry about the comments for the colours.

Good one

Submitted by varun on Wed, 18/01/2006 - 11:56pm.

Good one!

Any ideas why the colours look odd on your laptop? Maybe I am using shades that cannot be comfortably displayed by all monitors. Does this happen for other sites too?

How about uploading a screenshot to imageshack.us?

Dodgy Laptop

Submitted by Sahil (not verified) on Wed, 25/01/2006 - 8:53am.

I dont know why the colors look horrible on my laptop. Must be some cheap dodgy toshiba laptop.

I took a screenshot but then thought if it appears bad on my laptop its most probably the screen as the color information will remain same. And just as I thought when I took the screenshot to my desktop everything appeared perfect. So no use uploading the image.

tricky question

Submitted by varun on Wed, 25/01/2006 - 9:46am.

Hmmm... I think if there is some problem solely in your laptop screen i.e. all other video related thingies are working OK then the screenshot will probably not be much helpful. But if your screen is alright and problem is somewhere more core (for e.g. the video component or your drivers) then the screenshot will be a true capture of what you actually see. Anyways if the problem occurs again take a screenshot and upload it somewhere online.

Color blind

Submitted by JhQ (not verified) on Wed, 25/01/2006 - 4:51pm.

Sahil, you do realise that you are color blind!!!

what happened to your blog?

Submitted by varun on Wed, 25/01/2006 - 7:49pm.

really?!?

@JhQuest: Abey tere blog ka kya hua? Have been waiting for it since ages.

All setup but need to

Submitted by JhQ (not verified) on Sun, 29/01/2006 - 8:40am.

All setup but need to configure drupal, This will take me a bit of time to get used to it and configure it, too much on my hands right now, maybe I'll ome around to setting it up very soon....

Blog first, hack later

Submitted by varun on Mon, 30/01/2006 - 4:24pm.

I think you are taking this blog thing a bit too seriously.

It takes around 10 minutes to create the database and tables, 10 minutes to change the settings in a couple of files and upload them and maybe another 10 minutes to configure the blog from inside Drupal. There are many good ready made themes that you can use to get off the ground quickly. I feel it will be easier to just start blogging first and polish it up later.

My personal experience has been that incremental improvements are more effective than waiting for the 'big day', especially for busy (=lazy) people like me :-)

Nice Drupal Blog Theme Mate

Submitted by Hone Watson (not verified) on Wed, 25/01/2006 - 6:39am.

Have you had any experience with wordpress?

Wondering how easy it is to develop themes with drupal?

negligible experience with WordPress

Submitted by varun on Wed, 25/01/2006 - 9:39am.

I have used WordPress two times for short periods of time. Both the times I was evaluating different blogging CMSes to see which one suits me the best. However I find it difficult to use any other CMS because I miss all Drupal's power and flexibility.

Developing themes with Drupal is quite easy. This particular theme took me 2 hours for the first draft and a couple more to fine tune everything. As with almost everything else the first attempt takes the longest. It took me more than 2 days to design my first Drupal theme. However now I am quite comfortable with Drupal themeing. Visit themes.drupal.org and Drupal Showcase to see a variety of Drupal themes and sites.

Drupal Themes

Submitted by themegarden.org (not verified) on Sat, 26/05/2007 - 10:59pm.

The themes.drupal.org was closed (after Drupa 5 release), but very similar site was launched.

At Drupal Theme Garden you can see in action (live) Drupal Themes (both Drupal 4.7 Themes and Drupal 5 Themes)