As I was developing my Round and Round theme, I looked around for some round RSS icons to put with the feed link, and didn’t find any, so I made some. I thought there might be others who would be interested, so I thought I would do several colors and share them here. If you just want one 32px icon, grab it from here in the post. If you want the whole set of icons, here’s the zip file. It contains a 16px, 32px and 64px of each color above (PNG files). Also, here’s the EPS file, if you’d rather use that to customize the color to one more to your liking.

(you might be wondering, why didn’t the cute little round icon show up in the theme demo? That’s because I made a mistake in how I called the image… but, that’s another post)

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(Are you tired of hearing about this theme yet?) Well, it’s been released, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens! I ended up changing it to display best on 1024×768 and put instructions in the Stylesheet for an easy switch to 800×600 in case there were those who would need that based on their readership. Thanks to Cory Miller for helping this newbie out with the release.

The only real issue is that the Theme Viewer displays the transparent areas as an icky gray color. It’s really unfortunate, because a lot of people will pass it right by, thinking, “ewww, who would design a theme like that?” But, there’s nothing I can do about it. Thanks again for everyone’s input and help!

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Phil Nash is a genius. His trick for making backgrounds transparent while still allowing the other items stacked on top in the div to keep their opacity put the icing on the cake in my first theme for WordPress. Here’s the code

I originally had it in a class, and that didn’t work in Firefox. Once I moved it to a div, it worked except it needed the conditional statement around the bit for IE for it to work in Firefox. (Phil did some more tweaking for me and the class worked fine. I changed the code above to reflect.) Take a look at the theme now. I think it’s a nice touch that makes the whole thing more interesting.

So… the white space on the right side is bothersome to some, it seems. I’m going to work on a variation of the background to include with the theme. Thanks for all the input, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken to leave comments- keep it coming today. I’ll probably release the theme tomorrow.

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I’m almost to the point of releasing my first theme for WordPress called “Round and Round”. My goal for this first one, was just to design a clean, uncluttered theme that has a different look than others I’ve seen out there. I’m more of a design person than a code person, so I didn’t set out to create a theme with lots of fancy options. My original idea for the post area was to use transparency so that you could see the background faintly through the white, and it looked really cool… until I realized what you CSS uber-gurus already know: the transparency will apply to everything in the div, not just the background. So, images in the posts were transparent to the same degree as the background, and that would never work and I had to get rid of the effect unfortunately.

This being my first theme, I thought before I released it, I would ask any who are willing to check it out here, and give me some input. Any constructive input is appreciated! I’m considering offering a couple of different background options here on this site that users could easly switch out if they wanted something different than the swirly dots. Is that something you think people would make use of?

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Ben Yoskovitz wants to know our secrets to productivity. He is sponsoring a group writing project called The Ultimate Guide to Productivity and my friend Char at Essential Keystrokes tagged me to participate. This is a topic that interests me and I’ve been reading other entries hoping to get some tips, as I never have enough time in the day to do all that I want to do. Here is how I approach my work:

• Break tasks down into small bits. I rarely complete anything in one sitting. Many times, I’ll pass by the computer when I have two minutes as my son is finishing his lunch and continue on with something I’ve left halfway done. I might only get one small step towards completion, but at least it’s movement. When I do have a block of time, I try to choose one task and turn everything else off, e-mail, feed reader, etc. If I have several small bits to work on that are all related, I try to wait until I have a block of time when I can knock them all out at once.  I often create the posts for my two monetized sites for the week in one larger block of time, and use the timestamp feature in WP to space them out through the week.

• Choose tasks to accomplish in order of priority. Finishing projects when I said I would is of the utmost importance to me, so that’s a key factor as I prioritize. Besides deadlines, I prioritize by considering my long-term goals and by what is going to give me the best monetary return on my time investment.

• The feed reader and stats analysis can be big time suckers. I find that I have to weed things out of my reader regularly and I try to choose which feeds I will keep wisely, keeping only the most valuable.

• I do the icky stuff first if I can, so I can look forward to the fun stuff. Procrastination is from the Devil.

• There is no dead time, unless I just need some time to zone out. When I’m standing in line somewhere I’m thinking about blog posts. When I’m a passenger in a car I’m imagining logo design possibilities, etc.

• Make it as easy to work as possible. I have a computer in two main areas in our house, so that if I start a blog post on one, I can finish it on the other. I use gmail, so I can easily manage my e-mail from either computer.  I try to keep things as organized and as easy to find as possible.

I usually cop out on tagging people, I confess, but this time I’m going to tag a couple:

Brian Gardner - because I can’t believe how much he has going on, and I’m always wondering how he gets it all accomplished.

Cory Miller - also seems to have many projects going on at once and always with high quality results.

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Have you seen the new Wordpress Theme Generator? This free tool was recently launched, and I tried it out today just for fun. (Thanks to Cory Miller for pointing me to it.) If you wanted just a basic, widgetized theme to customize, this would be a decent place to start. Using some drop down menus and color choosers, you can generate a customized theme in a very short time that works with WP 2.1 and all current browsers. I “designed” a theme and set it up in my test installation of WordPress and it worked fine. I didn’t go into the CSS at all- just installed a widget to make sure it worked. There is obviously a need for some tweaking, such as some padding in the sidebars and some other adjustments, but it’s a good idea and kudos to this young man from Rotterdam who built it!

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