My New Blog Theme Released!

Ive finally finished my blog theme, it has some quirks, but those will be worked out.

So you probably want to get to customizing the theme for yourself right away, to make it your own. First, open your current blog while you are signed in and click on 'My Blog Dashboard'. This will take you to...your blog dashboard. From here you want to click on 'Configure' on the main tab bar.

 Once you are in the theme tab. Open the drop down menu and select Granite. You will get an alert of 'Are you sure you want to configure a different theme? Any unsaved changes made to this theme's configurable options will be lost.'. Just letting you know you cant go back to your old settings. So if you want to save your configuration of your old theme, click export on the bottom of the theme tab before you change your theme. If you chose to export your current theme config you can always go back to the way your blog used to look by selecting that theme again and importing that XML file.

Now you should be in the configurations options for the Granite theme. You should see 6 tabs, General, Header, Sidebar, Body, Custom Styles, Preview.

General

Changes made here will be represented all over the blog.

General Content: Changes made to these options will change the way regular (not otherwise modified) text is displayed throughout the blog.

Links: These will change the way links are colored throughout the blog. To modify links further you will have to modify the 'a' style in Custom Styles, but that will be covered later.

Background: Pretty self explanatory, the background color of the blog.

Header

These options only effect the header portion of the blog.

Header Color: This is the color of the header's background, the 'swoosh'

Text Color/Font/Font Size: All of these modify the font of the title of your blog (not the description/tagline)

Body

I think you can tell what part of the blog this will change.

The difference between Post * and List *:
 Any List option will be reflected in each blog post listed on the homepage of your blog.
 Any Post option will be reflected in each blog post in its own page.

m/.* Title/: These options will change the font of the title of the blog post.

m/.* Body/: These options will change the background of the blog post.

The text in the body of the posts is the default font specified by "General -> General Content"

Sidebar

At this point I think you can tell what is what and what it will change in the sidebar.

The one thing I do want to touch on are Sidebar Widgets. To get to them "Sidebar -> Sidebar Content -> Sidebar Widgets".

Here you can greatly customize the way your sidebar looks. I have stuck with the default, added my Xbox360 Gamer Card via an HTML IMG link using a "generic content" widget. I also added my latest twitter feed via an "RSS Reader" widget. You can use widgets to add a picture, a list (from your blog lists), RSS feeds, even videos. You can embed Widgetbox.com widgets, you can even add your own custom widgets. I suggest you play around and find a way to make the sidebar on your blog exactly how you want it. You can also style all of the individual widgets.

Custom Styles

 This section allows you to customize any CSS tags not editable with the dynamic theme UI.

For example, The 'a' tag is listed in the CSS (located at ~/Themes/Blog/Granite/Style/style.css) as :   a { text-decoration:none;  }
Say you're not happy with this, you want all of your links to be overlined and italic. Simply add this to your "Custom Style" page and it will be reflected in your blog:
a
{
    font-style:italic;
    text-decoration:overline;
}

Once you are comfortable with the way your blog looks, just click 'Save'.

If you have any issues, getting ahold of me on twitter, or via message here would be the ideal way.

Feel free to download and use my theme on your Community Server 2008 Blog: Granite.zip
Just unzip and place in your ~/Themes/Blogs folder