Presenting The Tao of You
Because I’m of the strong opinion that creation’s ultimate desire is to be shared, I’m letting the theme I currently use into the public flow. I stripped out some of the personal bits holding this place together, laid down a bunch of generic code, and wrapped this theme into a zip file. It’s now a free creature living under a GPL License. Suppose a couple folks might want to use it, and if not then no harm done.
Again, the standard caveats apply; I am a bumbler when it comes to putting these things together. My code kung-fu is not strong. It is a bit of a mess under the hood, and I am sure I’ll need to fix a swarm of bugs. Nonetheless, and perhaps contrary to certain standards, here it is.
The Tao of You sports the following attributes:
- Valid XHTML & CSS
- Big, fat footer
- Features Jessica Doyle’s Art
- Right footer sidebar area is Widget Enabled
- hatom enabled
- Support for In-line Asides
- Nice footer spot to lay down a natural language hcard
- Rotating picture in the footer
- Supports a bunch of plugins
- Site Map & Search page templates
- Clean as a new set of sheets, looking, maybe not internally
Important Note 1
The Tao of You is a hacked up version of Small Potato’s Basic Concept theme, or that is the theme from which this one sprang. I strongly recommend you check out Small Potato’s site. Not only does he offer a bunch of great themes, but he posts frequent blog reviews that can help one get a better grasp on building and maintaining a weblog.
Important Note 2
You will need to edit files in order for this theme to suit your needs. As for myself, I enjoy doing this, but not everyone does, nor does everyone feel comfortable doing so. Therefore, I want to be very clear that you will have to wade into these theme files, and change a bunch of things to make it your own. It might be a nice theme to play around with in this respect, or to learn from, not that you can learn anything from my code, but you can learn by ripping it apart. I included a PDF and text file that walks you through what files need to be changed.
Tao of You Credits
One could make the argument that everything is derivative. In the case of this theme, it would not exist without the following people and their resources:
- Jessica Doyle: I’m quite fond of Jessica’s art. You can see some of it on her Flickr page. She’s also a lovely person to boot.
- Christian Montoya: Who wrote a wonderful comments.php and offered it to everyone as a download. I use his template all the time.
- Chris Pearson: Who wrote a very sweet Site Map template and offered it to everyone as a download.
- Neil Lee: The Bottom Bar Author info was inspired by his damn cool weblog.
- Automatic Labs Random Image Rotator: Which is apparently off-line at this point, or the links I once had no longer go where they once did, and a quick Google search didn’t turn up anything convenient. In any event, the image rotator is included in the download so you get the fruits of their labor.
In Conclusion
I’m sure I’m forgetting to credit someone, but those are the people that come to mind. So, without further ado, grab the Tao of You theme below and get to creating something fine.
Download the Tao of You Theme (186.7 KiB, 1,247 hits)
Further Reading
So Sorry
But comments are currently disabled while I work out some bugs and explore the feasibility and wisdom of implementing the Intense Debate comment system. I apologize for being a buzzkill, but they'll be back up soon. You can always contact me if your about to burst with a classic riposte or feel a pressing need to reach me.
