iLEMONed

The 5-year-old BlogBus is the earliest and most reputed blog service provider in China. Their 5th anniversary ceremony will be staged this weekend in Wuzhen, an ancient water town south of the Yangtze River. Congrats to them! It's my great honor to be invited to the event but my schedule wouldn't let me fly to Shanghai for a weekend. Definitely my regret of the year.

Last week, a very famous technical expert Chedong, who served Yahoo China as a senior product manager, announced his job-hopping to BlogBus. I would say that the 4 chief officers of BlogBus now forms an all-star team. I'm looking forward to seeing new actions from them in year 2008.

Back to the topic, I was also asked by their COO Mr. Wei Wuhui, a man of wisdom, to make a WordPress theme as a birthday present for his company. Hence this 3-column, right sidebar, neat and elegant theme.

Theme requires WordPress 2.3 or above, tested in Firefox / IE6 / IE7 / Safari. Oh, and it's widgets-friendly.

Download English version (v1.0)
Download Chinese version (v1.0)

Yep, I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 and started using a new theme "BlueScent".

I had waited so long for WordPress 2.3 to come and planned to change the permalink structure to better use the native tagging support. But I got stuck at the second thing. Neither of the two reputed redirection plugins worked properly. At last I had to manually add redirection rules to .htaccess. So I really need to remind you: NEVER change your permalink structure, unless it is really necessary and you fully understand how to do it. Or this risky task will definitely piss you off!

Theme was entirely rewritten last night, codes are now tidy, and satisfying. The design is not completely new, I had been using a similar one for a week or so around January this year. But I never had time to finalize it. It was formerly with bubbles in the post entries section, which made me want to vomit after using it for a short while. So no bubbles now. The bottom area has gone because I don't know what to fill it with. Also I plucked away menu tabs, simply because I'm seeing them too often. So no tabs, just a common list of pages at the right top corner. You may say the calendar-look date mark is what you've been seeing too often. I won't fight it but just let me try that at least once.

Any thought on this theme? Please drop a line.

I will be happy if you admit that you were fooled, but I'll be even happier if you say you've been waiting all along for the real deal. Tags are no longer going to be a part of WordPress 2.2, so I changed my mind and the theme is now available for download. Thank you for your patience. Now I give you Wolfgang Bartelme's "dark" theme.

The theme has been tested on WordPress 2.1.3 with Firefox and Safari, may play well with IE6/7 too. It validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.0, and supports the following plugins:

• flickrRSS
• Gravatar
• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• WP-PageNavi

Download the "dark" theme here (v1.01) Please do NOT link to the file directly!
Already using WordPress 2.3 and waved goodbye to UTW? Check the "svn" folder and you'll know what to do.

Update: A small customization kit is available at Bartelme's site.

Change Log:

1.01 (2007-04-23):

• Fixed a CSS bug for Archives page
• Fixed the alignment bug for search results

1.0 (2007-04-22):

• Initial release