Pink Lilies

Pink Lilies was the winner of the WordPress 1.2 style competition, back when we were being told that the xhtml was sacrosanct and all our styling had to be done through CSS. You know, a bit like wordpress.com I don’t really know why this wasn’t installed here when its fellow 1.2 styles Rubric and Toni were, but am guessing it was just a bit too pretty.

[ETA: actually, scroll down to the bottom of the page I linked and it becomes obvious why it wasn't installed here, and why we needed a better skeleton than Classic in order to make the styling-through-CSS thing workable.]

The original CSS for this was significantly more complex than that for X-blog so if there’s any residual flakiness please do let me know.

It’s another port, so you know what you have to do: copy and paste the content of pinklilies.txt into your custom CSS box, et voila! Pink flowers that don’t induce vomiting!

X-blog

So, there was this thread here with a whole raft of theme requests, and rather than wait forever for Matt to decide they are sufficiently blue and grey for his taste I said I’d take a look at porting them to custom CSS.

OK, so X-blog probably is sufficiently Kubricky to get installed here, but I’m a sucker for the brushed metal and the cute little buttons. (I don’t have a Mac, but I do have an IceWM skin on my Linux laptop to make it look like one. I also stuck one of the Apple stickers I got with my iPod on the case. It is pitiful.)

Naturally this is only relevant to wordpress.com users since if you have your own install, you can use the original theme. All you need to do with this one is pick the ‘no style’ Sandbox skin, then copy and paste the contents of x-blog.txt into your custom CSS editor. That’s it. You don’t even have to upload the images because I’m hosting them here.

I’ve tested it in Firefox and IE on the PC, but ironically I have no idea how it fares on a Mac. Any glitches you find are probably mine, so please don’t pester the original author.

The Literary Life

download

Since the custom CSS option was introduced on wordpress.com, many people have been saying that this feature is only useful for those who already know how to code their own CSS, or have the time and patience to learn.

Well, no more. Here is my first style for the Sandbox theme. If you can edit stuff in a textarea, you can get this working. (If you can’t edit stuff in a textarea, your blogging career is likely to be very short and you will have no need of it anyway.)

It works for me with all the basic layouts you’ll find under ‘Sandbox skins’, so you can change the number of columns without having to alter the custom CSS. And yes, you can use it with Sandbox on your own wordpress install — instructions for both .com and .org are in the zip.

It’s GPL, of course, so you can mutilate it however you want without linking back (and if you mutilate it really badly, I’d sort of rather you didn’t associate me with it) but if you do want to give credit where it’s due and help other people find a template, a link back here or to the main site at http://not-that-ugly.co.uk would be lovely.