Blogger Theme: The Magic Attic

Hey guys!
Bragging time again :D You know you wanna know about it, I can see it in your eyes. Aaanyways, I did 2 things this week and I'm loving them both.

1. The Magic Attic - Blogger Theme

This one was my first minimalist theme, with dark colors. I love dark colors, well I love all colors but I totally love doing new things. Check it out:

I really like these themes with widgets in the header section, I don't know why but I'm totally loving them. I'm happy Bree liked the theme, and I hope she'll have fun using it.

Though it is minimalistic-style, I did do the header, social media icons, a post signature/post divider, a blog button, rating system and a few post stickers, Bree's blog has a lot of activities going on :D Go check it out for yourself and see everything live.

There's one thing that I'd like to mention, and that is that themes like this one that have more color coding them image inserts in them load a lot faster then others very rich in graphics. When you have a lot going on on your blog, you might want to consider the loading time. Just saying :)

2. Belle Books - Rating system & Blog Button

The lovely Emma told me she'd like a rating system and a blog button that would showcase her love for the anime style. Again, a first for me, and me being a total anime otaku (xDD), I had a heap of fun making these:

See them, on the right? Pink & yellow baby, all the way :D

Though I often make the rating system, blog button and such matching the themes I do, it's not a must that they'd be all matchy-matchy, then can go together well without having theme elements incorporated. It all depends on how you like your stuff, in the end.

Anyways, on to the next, right?
:D

Theme parts and color schemes...

Hey guys!
I'm here to brag a bit again, lol. I've been busy lately, which is, of course, a marvelously stupendous thing to be when you're doing something you love. Hence the bragging, haha.

First thing, I did a CSS color scheme personalization for the fabulous Cion theme from Elegant Themes. I take no credit for the theme structure, functions and awesomeness, I just whipped up a black/gray color scheme option aside the purple, green and blue ones my friend Nadine already had in the original theme. They did give their permission for the color scheme to be added, and I was sort of in awe of the awesome coding the theme has. So if you have a Wordpress blog, like compact, sleek themes that come with a lot of options and easy to do customizations and color schemes in your Control Panel, you might want to consider this one, I mean I would.

Really, really awesome theme structure that Elegant Themes came up with. Thumbs up all the way to the sky!


Secondly, I did some inserts for K.A. Tucker's new blog, I had a blast doing these because she gave me awesome material to work with, there's nothing that makes a PS fiddler happier then great material to work with :D
I can't show you all of the stuff here, I'm just gonna show you some of my tweaks and you'll just have to go on over to her blog and check them out there:

What I did was the post signature, the blog button, the social media icons, the 3 Team stickers (my favorite part of the whole thing, really), some sidebar header/blockquote customizations and that's about it I guess.
Really loved working on it all, and now I can move on my dear friends, Ali and Bree's stuff, who may or may not start harboring murderous intents for me, lol.

P.S.: I bow in gratitude to K.A. Tucker's uber-awesome post, her kindness and generosity knows no boundaries. You should totally read her books too, just saying :D

*fless in a Speedy Gonzales-like cloud of dust*

Blogger Theme: Ali's Bookshelf

Hey guys!
I'm very happy to tell you about the theme I just completed yesterday, Ali's. I loved working on it because it keeps the structure of the theme my book blog has on, but it's so different at the same time. I loved working on it and I'm really happy with the way it came out.

Fun and lively, right? Plus brown/green is a color scheme I personally like a lot :D Go over to Ali's Bookshelf to see it live, I especially recommend the rating system at the footer, it's totally cute!

So, her theme was all decked out, background, header structure edits, menus, signature that serves as a post divider as well, blog button, social media icons, the works. She had this header image she really loved so I did as she wished and worked with that, the doggy, the reading girl, they were all elements of that image.

She was awesome to work with and I'm very glad I had the chance to do so. So now then, let's move on to the next xDD Very excited about it as well :D

IntenseDebate Comment System

I installed it on my book blog as soon as I had it up, it seemed the most sensible solution to me. The theme I was using had a format I really really loved, but the comments area wasn't working for whatever reason. Installing a 3rd party comment system was a must.

It's pretty cool from what I've seen, you have a whole Control Panel at your disposal to customize it up and down and sideways, there's an option to leave your old comments visible in the old commenting system or hiding them, installing it as a widget or integrating it in your theme, and it's one click easy to install some plugins for it.

It looks good, it works good from what I've experienced so far, and it's easy to use. On my book blog I integrated it into the theme - I believe now it wasn't such a bright idea. Now if I wanna uninstall it I might have some issues; there's instructions on how to make clean break and everything, but I still think I shouldn't have gone so hardcore and installing it in the theme template. I mean, if I botch it up when trying to uninstall it, I would have lost the comments and I don't like the idea, but I will be able to find a solution to it, I do themes for a hobby, how hard can it be? Ok so it can horribly hard but I've got the patience and the skills to fiddle with it. When you're considering installing it in your template though, be smarter then me, don't go all in.

So on this blog I'm installing it in widget mode with showing the older comments, the totally opposed way of installing it from my book blog. Hey, I could afford hiding any presumable older comments on that one, I didn't have any, lol, I installed IntenseDebate on it first thing when I set it up. On this one I have some comments and I wanted to see how keeping them and doing the cautious thing would go. We'll see with this post. If the comments system has any humor whatsoever, it won't work unless integrated into the theme code, lol. Techy stuff has the habit of becoming funny like that, right?
Anyways this is in the interest of theme developing, not just my own curiosity. As a theme designer I want to be sure by my own trial and error what I can and can't recommend, you know? I feel I should be informed.

And since searching for the pros and cons of installing 3rd party comment systems I found articles saying not a lot of data is available on the down and dirty aspects of it all, my best advice to you is, if it ain't broken, don't try to fix it. Especially if you're gambling with your theme, comments, or mental balance, lol.

P.S.: If you don't see a Reply button or Comment button or anything similar, it means the widget magic isn't working out. I'll come back with an update as soon as this is posted, lol.

Edit 1: Yep, just as I thought, the widget thing didn't work out for this theme. It's too 'advanced', lol, so I ended up integrating in the theme here as well. But, I made a backup copy of the theme without it before doing that, you should make and keep that copy too if you're going to try this out.
I installed it to show on new posts, meaning old comments still show up and the old commenting system shows up on them. This is reasonable, I believe. Now let's try uninstalling the IntenseDebate system after making one comment on this post, exporting it and seeing if the template survives and comments can still be made. This is going to be an adventure, lol.

Shall come back with updates, lol.

Edit 2: So, uninstalling ID leaves your previous comments intact, and the posting form on them, but new posts where the ID system was installed the posting comments form pulls a Houdini, i.e. disappears. Funny right? However reuploading the theme file with the ID system installed retrieves the ID system AND posts that were posted while you had in installed.
I'm going to assume you could fix the posting of your Blogger template after uninstalling ID, or you could go with another commenting system like Disqus, I didn't try it but I think it would work. The posts though I suspect will remain within the ID, so kick it, kick the posts.
In other words, this is an option you're making for good or willing to forgo the comments when you switch over. It's an administrative decision you need to make about your blog. I hope you'll make it knowing the facts :)

GFC is going down - what the blog am I to do? | Spread ❤, not Hate! - excerpt

Hey guys!

A quick note, today the Spread <3, not Hate! event takes place, check it out and join in maybe? I'd love you if you would spread the word or the links of posts you find inspiring to people who have been bullied or who tend to bully. You never know what might change someone's mind about something, so you should never stop trying. :)
Check it out:




Now, since I'm a book blogger myself, and participate in meme's and blog hops and stuff, I thought it would be nice to share my thoughts (useless as they might be, lol) on some blog-ish stuff.

Rachel @ Parajunkee and Alison @ Alison can Read, I'm not trying to spamificate your awesome feature or butt in or anything, I'm just trying to get the message across and since it's directly related to your feature, that's why I'm mentioning you.

So, right now, as Parajunkee's #FF will show you or has showed you, there's some migration going from Blogger to Wordpress. This is not what we're going to discuss though if you'd like I could always give you my 2 cents on it anytime, you only have to ask. What we're going to talk about is:

Following Options.

Because as we all know, or are bound to find out, GFC is going to go R.I.P. for non-Blogger blogs. So this leaves us, follower-fans in a bit of a tough place, or at least it does so for me even if I don't intend on moving my blogs from Blogger at the moment.

What I'm about to say is going to make me look sucky perhaps, but it's my truth so I won't poppycock it. I don't want to subscribe by email to 100 blogs, I'm sorry. I follow a lot of blogs in many ways, but receiving email updates is not something that works out for me.
Why? Book blogs tend to be very active; like one post a day if not more, if they're really into it (and many are). What that leads to is, on top of all the emails I get every day (I'll make you a list if you want, but they get to a solid number believe me, and my blog is a small one!), 100 post updates daily is going to drive me literally insane. So email updates are out for me, because I'm not primarily a reader, I'm primarily a blogger and secondarily a reader. That means on my to do list for any day my reading books comes first, my blogging about them comes in tow, and reading what others have said about other or the same books comes after that. Am I the only one thinking that way? If I am, feel free to ignore my useless ramblings, lol.
I'm sure these are not the only options, but I'm just naming the ones coming to mind.

1. Feedburner

Just because GFC is out if you went to Wordpress, it doesn't mean you can't have a Feedburner working it's magic for you. Your theme has a traditional RSS icon incorporated? Groovy. I use Google Chrome as a primary web browser, so your RSS that shows up like :

http://www.yourwebsite'saddress.com/feeds/posts/default

or similar shows up as a bunch of senseless text for me and that's the end of it. It works fine in other browsers, but in the one I'm using it's basically useless. Could I open a new browser just to log in to all of my accounts and subscribe to your feed? I could, yes, but the question is will I? Will all the other Chrome'ers take that time to subscribe to your feed? My policy in such circumstances is why take the chance of finding out they won't? Give them options! Like adding a Feedburner icon or text link to your sidebar, aside all your counters, Team X stickers, and whatever else you've got. Maybe place it strategically near your social media icons, which I'm going to presume are in a really accessible and attention-grabbing spot on your blog, because you want people to notice and not ignore them. So put up there a Feedburner icon too, while you're at it. Your readers will love you for it, I know I will.

I'll tell you why I love Feedburner, and why you should love it too: it gives your readers options about how to subscribe to your blog. Options are the vital element here, if you ask me. A simple "Subscribe by email" option won't work for me or possibly for others like me, I'm sorry. If you have no other option for me, I'm most likely not going to subscribe; I would love to have a non-invasive way of staying up to date with your updates though, so Feedburner would be the number one solution I'd point out.

And, you can post your feed updates to places like Twitter and Facebook, and show off the number of your subscribers via this cool little counter they have, there's tones of options for doing tons of stuff. I heartily recommend using this option.

2. Google Reader

Google Reader is also something I love. It's included into the Feedburner options, but you can put it up as an option on it's own from what I've seen. I followed a few sites that had a Google Reader icon up in a visible  place on their blog. Follow/subscribe problem solved. How to add this separate option? Easy peasy, use your Google Webmasters option right here. Need other options? Search Google for a tutorial on how to, trust me, there's tutorials for bending your spine backwards, you will find one for these sorts of topics guaranteed.

3. Facebook NetworkedBlogs Follow Widget

If you have set up a NetworkedBlogs account for your blog through Facebook, you can always place the follower widget on your blog's sidebar. I personally only subscribe through it for blogs hosted outside of Blogger, because it's yet again a non-invasive option for me to keep up to date with your stuff. But I need to be selective about the blogs I want to subscribe to in this fashion because there's a limit of 200 blogs you can follow and write at the same time with a free account. I dunno if having a paid account solves that problem, but I'm not about to get one even if it is.
So if your blog has this option available and the only other option is Subscribe by email, I'll go for this, but I'd much rather have other options as well, just saying. You're killing another NetworkedBlogs blog's chance to be followed by me because you're not offering me any other options :p

4. Facebook Fan Page Subscribe Option

Did you know a Facebook Fan Page gives that option? Scroll down under the Likes icons, look for the blue text on the left side of your menu, way waaaay at the bottom. See that Get updates via RSS text?
Yeah, clicking it in my Chrome browser brings me a ton of text and no action, yet again, but others viewing your Fan Page on some other browser can still subscribe via that link. It's not really a top notch option if you ask me, but since we're on the topic of possibilities I'm just mentioning it. If you have Fan Page, and no other follow option, mention somewhere that your fans have this option available as well, some might not know about it and might like to use it.

5. BlogLovin'

Yes, yet another free tool for you to use. As a subscriber you just sign up for a free account, and then you can follow any and all blogs that have set up a BlogLovin' option for you. You can decide if you do or don't want to receive daily prompts about updates, so you can yet again keep track of your favorite blogger's updates in a non-invasive way.
So, fellow book blogger, you might want to consider giving me this option. I will use it if it's available to me, and you can show off your follower numbers just like with Feedburner to impress those publishers. It's free, it's easy, it's pretty straightforward. Give it a try.

I have read some opinions similar to:

 "I don't want to fill up my sidebar with all sorts of subscription options and widgets and stuff making my sidebar look all busy and ugly."

Fair enough, it's your blog, your option. It's my option to subscribe or not, as well. If you're trying to push into the Subscribe by email option alone, you'll find I don't like that sort of pushy attitude and will not subscribe. If you're featured on the awesome Parajunkee and Alisan Can Read's Follow Friday and you're thinking I have to follow you through your one-way option, keep this in mind: the blog hop will be there next week, and the week after that, and the week after the week after that... you're only featured once though, you might not want to miss all the opportunities this might give you, hm? :)
Just my thoughts.

That being said, this is an excerpt from my #FF post on my book blog, but since it's got a bit of blog device advice I though I'd post it up here as well. Maybe I'll make more of these posts here, what do you guys think?
Thank you!