So I finally replaced the header image above for this theme, choosing a “1980s MTV” theme instead.

The images are taken from my favourite promo clips growing up. From left to right:

1. “Road to Nowhere” - Talking Heads: great surrealism from the masters of art-punk
2. “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” - Pink Floyd: one of my favourite songs as a kid; although I never actually saw this clip until years later, it still has great personal relevance to me
3. “Don’t Come Around Here No More” - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: this clip freaked me the hell out as a seven-year-old, and as a bonus, it’s inspired by one of my favourite books
4. “Every Breath You Take” - The Police: a great clip for a great song by a great band, directed by the greats Godley & Creme
5. “Sledgehammer” - Peter Gabriel: the clip that made me a lifelong fan in 1986
6. “Babooshka” - Kate Bush: minimalistic (as most clips were at the time) but utterly memorable, plus I always associate it with my grandmother despite the title being a total misnomer
7. “Money for Nothing” - Dire Straits: the definitive ’80s promo clip and my favourite track at the time

I’m going to attempt to upgrade to WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 1 this morning. This will involve deleting the current installation, uploading the new version and updating the database tables, then praying that everything works.

Here goes nothing…

Update: it seems to be working, though the changes aren’t obvious to the reader. I’m now going to take a crack at using the new randomised display feature for tag clouds.

After getting negative feedback from a few different over-50 types on the (un)readability of the previous ChaoticSoul/KaoticControl theme, I’ve switched to Talian 1.0 as my blog’s new theme.

It’s actually not a bad theme, though I might tweak it some more later.

Thanks to my mum for taking the photo below of the bush in our area — I turned it into the header image above.

I’ve just added a page for my own version of ChaoticSoul, creatively called KaoticControl.

The page is here and the zipfile is HERE.

PLEASE NOTE: see this page for a zipfile containing my modified theme.

I was quite disheartened when I installed the ChaoticSoul Wordpress theme here on The WhimWham only to find out that the publicly available version of the theme was quite a bit more primitive than the version being used on Wordpress.com… so I did what any self-respecting geek does: rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty with some theme customisation!

Here’s what I did:

• modified the main page display so that all posts display fully rather than using excerpts — simply go into index.php and replace the_excerpt() with the_content()
• made the sidebar widget-capable, including a customised search box widget that restores the original theme’s search box appearance — very simple if you read this tutorial and take notice of how ChaoticSoul’s native sidebar is coded
• changed the hardcoded “chaoticsoul” text in the header so that it instead displays the blog’s name as given in the admin options — just change chaotic<span>soul</span> to <?php echo get_option(’blogname’); ?> in header.php. (This one is so obvious that I don’t see why it wasn’t included in the first place.)
• added a byline under posts on their individual pages — go into single.php and add ~ by <?php the_author(); ?> on <?php the_date(); ?>. within a <p> tag with a style that’s appropriate
• modified the header image so that it now uses the “Custom Image Header” feature available in the admin interface — read this tutorial and note that to display the image you can call header_image() in the header.php file
• added my name to the footer text

A lot of this could be achieved by hardcoding various bits and pieces (such as a custom header image), but where’s the fun in that?

(For anyone interested: the custom image header mod is more involved than the others just because of the way the theme was initially written with two images instead of one. The mod basically involves using an overlay image over the header image uploaded through the admin panel, thereby dividing it in two.)

I’ll probably tweak things further as I go, but as it stands I’ve got a pretty decent facsimile of the theme as presented on Wordpress.com.

Addendum: I just had to fix the unordered list style as well for the first post on the main page. They really need to publicly release the Wordpress.com revision of this theme because version 1.0 is far too buggy as is.

My name is Dion C. Detterer, and this is my blog.

For the last two-and-a-half years, I’ve been blogging mostly about pop culture, with the occasional forays into bad poetry and politics. My life, however, is now changing dramatically, and so I want to make a symbolic break with the past by creating a new personal blog.

My old blog’s archives can instead be found here. (This post will always contain a current link to these archives, no matter where they may end up.) While I’m at it, I’m also declaring Bleat! (my experiment in group-blogging) officially defunct.

My movie reviews blog, Dion at the Flicks, is still very much active, however.

But let’s not dwell on the past — the future awaits!