I’ve removed the “Starscape” logo from the footer, added a Twitter “box” and managed to get the multi-category widget to work without breaking the theme (and got it so the MC search provides only the excerpts). It looks like all I have left to do is copy everything over to the Lavender Room, do some color tweakage, then commence to repost the stories. Whoo hoo!

Yup. You read that right. Despite getting absolutely no response from my friends on LJ and IJ, I’m resurrecting the Pinkish Pages. A number of folks on the fanfiction forums Max belongs to apparently are interested in my bringing it back to life. Especially if I republish the fics that were archived at the original Pinkish Pages. Well, I got plenty of them, as well as a bunch of fics that I received permission to post but never got around to coding, so the new archives will have a good deal to offer even before new authors begin submitting.

I’ve found a template that would work with multi-authors and could be adapted to an appropriate Pinkish Pages theme. I’ve added a few widgets and plugins that I feel would be beneficial, such as the rating plugin. This would give visitors the opportunity to offer input without having to write a full comment. I’ve tweaked how the posts display so that authors can include a description as an excerpt, and that is all that shows until the viewer clicks the story’s title. There’s an author page so visitors can not only read a particular author’s already existing posts, but can subscribe to their individual feed. About the only concern I still have is listing the authors and their works in the sidebar.

I’ve got at least one more page to write before I can think about posting the old fics. Then I need to copy the theme, plugins, et al over to the Lavender Room, tweak the color scheme and post all the old fics from that archive. Oh, and I need to install the Google XML plugin to keep Google and other search engines up to date automatically.

Needless to say, I’m very busy.

I’ve been busy making stuff for my Town Day craft table, but I managed to find some time today to revive the Gen-X Essays from the old site. I’m kind of posting them here out of order, physically. The actual post dates are the dates they were originally posted, so they’re going to kind of stand out in the quilt. The first one, “Sex!!!” (which is actually the second essay I wrote) was posted today. I’ll see if I can get more posted tomorrow.

I bumped Maxwell Pink up to author status to get an idea of what would be accessible, for possible future reference. Yes, I’m still thinking of doing it. 😉

I’ve been in contact with David Hayes, the creator of Kaleidoscope. He developed an update that addresses the big issues I had. I absolutely love designers that take the time to connect with the users of their themes! I still need to adjust the font sizes, and do some tweaking to make the theme look better in Firefox. I also have to put the search widget in. I completely forgot it was taken out of the theme proper in favor of a redesigned widget. Anyways, Kaleidoscope is now the official theme of “A Web Site Created by Babs.”

I was reading David’s “About” page. It appears we have at least one thing in common: the need for the perfect template/theme and the lack thereof forcing us to teach ourselves how to play with other people’s code. I still need to brush up on my knowledge of stupid CSS tricks, and then I get to have fun learning about PHP. Maybe then I can start designing themes of my own. Yay!

…I am helping the author of this theme track down the sidebar issue *waves* so it’s going to be this way for a few days.