By the way, Trish’s brief (explanation) of her design is on the post too.

about old news
release notes
faq’s
screenshot, demo, & download links
donations
comments & support

About Old News

I couldn’t sleep one night - kept having a creative idea about a wordpress theme that resembled an old newspaper, but was still built around the actual content (the news itself) and not the graphic design. That vision changed a bit as I coded it, but the essence of the theme is that of a newspaper look and feel. Ultimately, it’s a personal blog theme, probably not the best for a business, but great for blogging.

The theme was developed in a WordPress 2.8 testing environment and is fully 2.8 compatible, right down to the threaded comments. Here are some things that I think make it stand out…

• Focus on usability - very easy to navigate, fonts are large, padding is somewhat generous.
• Built on a grid, so it’s easy to customize to different sizes.
• Plenty of comments throughout the files to help you customize it.
• Planned for some ad spaces.
• Breadcrumbs are built in - no plugin needed.
• Includes every possible theme file except a home.php. I plan on developing a few optional home.php files and offering them separately.
• Works just as well in plain white with no background (see screenshots) for an example.
• jQuery tabs are built-in for the top widget to condense some sidebar space.
• Used soft gray lines to guide the eyes through the content flow.
• Four widgetized areas in the sidebar, the fourth at the bottom which appears only on the front page.
• GPL-compatible license. Credit to me is appreciated, but not required.

Release Notes

Release - 0.9.1, July 1, 2009 - added a horizontal listing/menu of child pages of the current page under the breadcrumbs in page.php.

Current Release - 0.9.0 beta, July 1, 2009

Why beta? I’d like to give it a week or two of use by others to see what bugs I might have missed. Then, when it’s ready to submit to the themes directory, I’ll upgrade it to 1.0. So please offer feedback in the comments below or via my contact form so I can make fixes.

I’d also like to thank a few friends on Twitter who tested the theme before its release… @jamesgarland, @joshhemsley, @ianroke, @cottonr, @jasonlinas, @Whodeeni, @stubbyd, @passionsista, and @wayne_etc.

Frequently Asked Questions

I’m assuming these will be frequently asked…

How do I replace the header’s title text with my logo?

Graphically, I would put in a transparent png, take a screenshot, clip your logo against my background and re-insert it as a jpeg. But that’s just me.

As far as the code goes, take out the following from header.php:

and insert this:

Your image file can be .jpg, .gif, or whatever, but store it in the /images directory of the theme’s files. Either name it logo.jpg or change the link in the above code accordingly. This will show your logo and will have an alt= text of your site’s name.

How do I insert adsense, amazon, or other script based code into the ad space?

This will require some working knowledge of css and html. In the sidebar, you’re basically going to need to create a div with margins and put the script inside that div to space it away from other elements. For example, if you want to insert a 250 pixel wide ad code into the 300 pixel wide sidebar, I would do this…

You say the theme supports threaded comments, but they don’t appear.

You must turn on threaded discussions in your admin panel under Settings > Discussion. I set my levels to 3, but you can do whatever you’d like.

I’ll add more to the faq’s as I hear questions frequently asked.

Screenshots, Demo, & Download

Working Demo

Download the Old News Theme zip file.

Screenshot of the theme in white with no background images…

(click for a full view)

Donations

Donations are not expected. You may certainly use the theme freely and I hope you enjoy it. If, however, you feel that it’s saved you time and money and it may even earn you some money, and you’d like to share, feel free to send a donation via paypal to brandon@egracecreative.com… or you could just post a really nice comment below.

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Protect Your Home in 140 Characters or Less!

• Forgot to feed our six pit bulls! Hostel gets especially grumpy when he’s hungry!
• Wish we could have gotten the gas leak fixed before leaving home, but were distracted by the other foul odor from the basement.
• About to stop at this army surplus store to pick up some trip wires - want to add to our exotic booby trap collection.
• We needed this holiday badly - after the HAZMAT team pretty much moved in and declared martial law at our house.
• Just figured out that foul odor, it’s the spoiling dynamite next to the pilot light of the furnace. (via Neal)
• Wow, these sand dunes remind me of the dessert where I lived during my training as an international assassin.
• Just had to get away from our redneck neighbor. His obsession with sawed-off shotguns and his drinking problem don’t mix!
• We picked this week due to that Nostradamus prediction about a meteor destroying our neighborhood. Hope he’s wrong.
• Left so we could bug-bomb the house after those giant cockroaches carried off two of our children to the bigger ones.
• As soon as we get home, we’re calling the tiny little lady from Poltergeist… we’ve got some issues we need “handled.”

photo credit: MeaganJean

Twitter

What I Like…

• People… lots of them. It’s popular and growing every day.
• Simplicity… no games, just 140 characters as part of conversations.
• I discover what’s relevant to my world via people with whom I have something in common.
• Support… the other day four people on Twitter helped me fix a problem on our church’s web site in a matter of minutes.

What I Use…

• TweetDeck on the desktop. (I’ve also tried Seesmic, Destroy Twitter, and Twhirl but I always come back to TweetDeck.
• Tweetie is my favorite app for the iphone, but I like Twitterfon for replying to multiple people, SimplyTweet for better conversation views and integration with Posterous, and TweetDeck for the iphone but I like the web version better.

FriendFeed

What I Like…

• Aggregation of all of my online profiles into one feed.
• Real-time on the web interface.
• Likes and comments, which are in some ways, better than retweets on Twitter.
• The bookmarklet, which lets me add an image from whatever I’m sharing.
• Groups, so I can browse feeds by subject matter.
• Smooth and seemless Twitter integration - my FriendFeed posts get tweeted too. (I call FriendFeed my favorite Twitter app.)

What I Use…

• The web interface
• The FriendFeed notifier, which is downloadable under your settings.
• BuddyFeed on the iphone.

Delicious

What I Like…

• Easy bookmarking.
• Extensive tagging, which makes for quick searching later.
• The ability to see how many others have bookmarked a link and how they’ve tagged it.
• The clean and simple web interface.
• Easy RSS feeds.

What I Use…

• The bookmarklets are essential.
• The iphone app (couldn’t locate a web link).

Google Reader

What I Like…

• Easy! Simple. Clean. Ajaxified!
• List view or full view.
• Sharing option posts to Friendfeed, and in turn, to Twitter.

One tiny feature desperately needed and strangly missing is the ability to mark something as read in list view.

What I Use…

• The web interface.
• The mobile version is better than any feed-related app I’ve tried on the iphone.

Posterous

What I Like…

• Splits the difference between blogging and micro-blogging.
• Clean!
• Extremely easy to use on the web or by simply emailing anything (text, video, photos, etc.) to post@posterous.com.
• Excellent bookmarklet interface.
• Growing network of other users.
• Import all of your contents from Tumblr, WordPress, or just about any other platform.
• Use a custom domain.
• Post to other profiles automatically.
• Post only to selected profiles by emailing to flickr@posterous.com, twitter@posterous.com, etc.

What I Use…

• The web interface.
• The bookmarklet, which I’ve synced with Safari on my iphone to use on the go.

Others Worthy of Mention

For video, I use Vimeo to upload, transcode, store, and share clips easily. On this site and my personal blog I’ve installed Backtype as a means of pulling in comments from Twitter and other networks. So far, I’ve stuck with Flickr for photo storage and sharing. I like LinkedIn, but don’t spend much time there. And for music I enjoy Last.fm (iphone app available) and Blip.fm but Pandora (iphone app available) is my favorite.

The amazing thing about all of these tools is that combined, they make it seem as though I’m all over the web all the time. The reality is, I can pop in and out, check on things, see what’s happening, what’s new, or what’s inspirational, and then go about my life.

By the way, feel free to mention or promote another in the comments below. Profile links are welcome, spam is not.

photo credit: James Jordan

• “Ah, stinkin’ Twitter is down again!” (uh, it’s free)
• “I’m so annoyed by Facebook’s games.” (yep, free)
• I had to park 90 feet from Walmart’s door. (parking is… free)
• The sermon was kinda long today. (Offerings are optional)
• Rain, rain, go away. (God charges nothing for the weather, which is kinda necessary for life to exist.)

I could go on, but you get the picture. Now here’s a life-changing truth…

An attitude of gratitude will change everything in and around you for the positive! In fact, it’s scientifically proven that just expressing thoughts of gratitude triggers the release of seratonin (the happy hormone) in the brain. Maybe we’ll get over our grumpiness and depression when we start being a bit more thankful.

Now, feel free to chime in about this post, but don’t complain… you’re reading it for free.

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Want more? Check my delicious links or my Tumblog.

And if you haven’t already (assuming you’re on Twitter), you should definitely follow Pablo.

Which one is the man?

What religion is symbolized by a cross? a crescent? the star of David?

Why does a schwaztika evoke such strong emotions, or a cross, or even a flag, on fire?

When you pick a four leaf clover, why do you think of Ireland?

Symbols… Powerful!

Consider what has been happening this week on Twitter in relation to Iran. An election has been hijacked and freedoms denied, so a generation of Iranians are protesting and on the social network, Twitter, one of the few places the protestors can seem to have some voice in the world, everyone is using green avatars to show support. Case in point…

What Symbolizes You?

Before I begin designing a logo, I ask that question and go to sketching. I like to hear someone’s vision before drafting a new logo. In fact, it’s more important that I hear from the leader with a vision than that I have a thousand photos of a business’ brick-and-mortar building. Here are some thoughts about symbolizing your business, organization, or even yourself via a logo.

It doesn’t have to make sense.

Isn’t it funny that an apple with a bite out of it either symbolizes original sin, or a Mac computer (or if you’re a die-hard PC fan, both). So your logo doesn’t need a tagline or slogan. It doesn’t have to include your name or initials. It doesn’t even have to be a picture of what you do.

It does need to be memorable.

This is why I start every design as a single-layer, one-dimensional, one color (or perhaps grayscale) image. If we add more later, fine, but sometimes symbols are complicated when we try to spell out the meaning or dress it up too much.

It must be meaningful over the long haul.

Your logo shouldn’t reflect merely what your business is doing these days, but what your business is for all time. Re-branding happens now and then, but it’s costly. You lose traction. You give up ground, so it had better be worth it down the road.

It needs to symbolize you, and nobody else.

This is why stock logos stink. Anybody can find a nice font and put a swoosh around it. It might look great, but are there dozens of other organizations that could easily pick up the same logo and run with it? Back to the drawing board.

It needs to tell a story.

I’m asked every now and again how I arrived at the eGrace Creative logo design. My daughter, Ella Grace (hence the “eGrace”) is the most creative person I know, and as of this writing, she’s only six! She inspired it. I want everything done with that logo stamped on it to represent genuine, from-the-gut-and-heart creativity. I’d like her approval.

Symbols matter. What symbolizes you? Or better yet, what does everyone else think symbolizes you?

Now don’t forget…

Shift: An Animated Essay from Heather Arment on Vimeo. First Discovered at the blog of John Saddington, aka human3rror.