Chris Meller

I’ve been idly working on a new theme for this site for quite a long time now. It’s now been pretty much completed, I just can’t decide what to do with the sidebar area. There’s so much somewhat random information that I think should go in the sidebar area that it invariably ends up looking cluttered and becomes a useless mass of text.

I’ve been considering a change in logic. Perhaps instead of placing random things like Flickr photos and Twitter feeds in the sidebar I should take a “gateway” approach (or something similar), in which the first page you see is a list of all the sites I use where you can find their individual feeds. Not only can you get to Flickr or Twitter and find me directly, but you can also click through to continue to my blog.

The only real downside here is that the best URL for such a gateway would seem to be chrismeller.com, which would mean my blog would need to move (either to an entirely new domain, a subdomain, or a ho-hum subdirectory). None of these are really desirable, I like my URL exactly the way it is now.

So the consideration goes on… Eventually I’ll probably just make an impulse decision and throw something up, just to get it out there and get over the decision-making hump.

It appears somehow the uploads directory I had on my Dreamhost account got wiped out. Nothing important there… except my Garland theme release. Since several people have been asking me about it lately, I thought it was time to wrap up a fresh release.

If you’re looking for the Garland theme for a stand-alone Wordpress blog, you’ve come to the right place!

In theory, this release shouldn’t be any different than the previous one, but I can’t promise that - I don’t recall having made some of these changes previously.

I’ve tried to get in touch with Matt to see if there is any way to get these changes into the Wordpress.com themes repo, but I have not yet heard back from him. In any event, please let me know if you notice any problems!

Changes

In a nuttshell, the changes are purely superficial - URLs mostly. The path for reaching the theme on the Wordpress.com servers differs from that of standalone blogs. Additionally, jQuery is not available on the admin pages of the current Wordpress release by default, while it is on Wordpress.com.

SVN / 2.5 Notes

While testing on the latest copy of trunk, I noticed that the plugin is unable to register its admin page. This is because the page for theme-related config has changed from ‘Presentation’ to ‘Design’ during the admin redesign project. Whether this will be true of the 2.5 release or not, I have no idea.

If you’re trying to run Garland on the bleeding-edge of Wordpress, you’ll want to change ‘Presentation’ to ‘Design’ in the 3rd to last line of functions.php to make sure it knows the proper page to hook into.

Download

Snag ‘er here: garland-standalone_1.5.zip