Test Star

Inspired by the new template I just installed for my Blogger blog, I decided to update the theme for this blog too. This blog is self-hosted and runs on a Wordpress platform, so since I was going to change things around, I decided to go ahead and upgrade my Wordpress to the 2.5 version too.

Wordpress Upgrade
Wordpress just released the 2.6 version, but I didn’t want to upgrade that far yet as I hadn’t really seen too many feedback on that version. I had read after version 2.5 was released that people lost data on their blogs after they upgraded. Then I read on the forums that a way to avoid this is to disable plugins first then do the upgrade. Luckily, I didn’t have many plugins installed on this blog yet, just the ‘share this‘ plugin. Back to the upgrade, it was actually quite painless. All I did was sign into my web host which is BLUEHOST.COM and go into Fantastico. All my websites that are in need of upgrade were listed and all I have to do is click on the website, choose which version I want to upgrade to, and that’s it!

When I signed back on to this blog, I had a brand spankin’ new dashboard, not the one I’ve gotten used to, but I’m sure that will come in time. Other than the look though, I really haven’t noticed any other difference. Everything still works pretty much the same except that they may be in a different place or called something else.

The New Frock
So after the upgrade, I decided to go ahead and change the look of this site. It looked so shabby and amateurish compared to my newly revamped food blog, so I thought, what the heck. Let’s go for it!

So I went back to eBlogTemplates to look for a theme and found the Lightbreaker Theme. It is similar to the one I used for the food blog; I like the clean lines and the area on the right where you can put ads. I like the way it looks already, but I still have quite a bit of tweaking to do, not to mention put back some of the elements I had on the old theme.

Here are a few things I’ve done and still have to do:
Background Color - I decided to go for a lighter color than the black. I’ve had black on the old template for so long that I was getting kind of tired of it. I didn’t want to deviate too far from black though because if I do, some of the elements in the body of the theme may not match and I won’t know how to change them. So I decided to change things one at a time. For now, these colors are good for me.

RSS feeds - update the links to the feeds so that they have the proper codes for this blog

125×125 section and other Ads - I’ll have to replace these with my own affiliate ads or at least change the referral codes so I can get credit when anyone signs up by clicking from here. Still working on it.

Blogroll - I really liked how my old blogroll was categorized and were listed on my sidebar by category. When I first installed this theme, the link list became just one big long list that didn’t make much sense. So I spent time looking for ways on how to fix this, only to find out a couple of hours later, that the fix was really easy! All I had to do was use the widgets instead of the default code in the theme. When you install the link widget, the default disappears and you’re left with that you see, categorically separated blogroll. I love it!