Pink for October

PHEW!!! At long last, I am back at the helm of my site. This isn’t the much anticipated and belabored “fleur” theme, but it’s new and that has to count for something.

Inspired primarily by Derek’s site and the crew at Pink for October, this theme is in support of National Breast Cancer Awareness month. If you aren’t familiar with the cause, you should check out the aforementioned links and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

In the name of expediency (and getting something out during the month of October), I decided to put off finishing the comments and trackback section. Those will arrive as soon as possible, along with a couple tweaks for the top navigation and some other little elements.

So let’s take a stroll around the new theme:

Although the layout, structure, color and typography are different from fleur, “flora” (this theme’s name) borrows key features. The footer contains 3 installations of Bill Rawlinson’s Feedlist plugin. They are handy for those days when I don’t have time to update this site, and instead draw from my activity on Digg, Last.fm, and Del.icio.us respectively. If you haven’t checked out those services, I highly recommend it. These form the backbone (or home.php) of Fleur. On a side note, I’ve come to the conclusion that the desktop player for last.fm has to be the buggiest piece of software for the mac I’ve ever encountered. But that’s material for a whole other post.

The sidebar has two sections currently, one for visitors on the index, and another while you are reading a single post. The index gives you my last 5 post titles (shifted back one thanks to c2c’s customizable post listings plugin so that you don’t have redudant titles), and then single pages show you related posts driven by Wasabi’s Related Entries 2.0 plugin.

Lastly, I found the wallpaper image at The Inspiration Gallery, a tremendous resource if you aren’t already familiar with it. I believe mine is under the “damask” category.

Once the comments are re-enabled, you will see ajax live previews, comment subscriptions, the ability to quote other posters, seperated trackbacks, and a couple other cool things. And if you are really lucky, you might even see an ajax search box in the side bar. All of these elements are currently live in Fleur, so we’ll see what I have time (and energy) to get done before October 31st.

So in summation, welcome back! Talk to you soon.