Placing a considerably remarkable amount of emphasis on my goal to compile a Pocket Reference as i’ve come to name my new Web Log, I have been working with the presentation section of the Dashboard (of this WordPress software) quite a bit. I’m really impressed with a lot of the themes available. In the case of my previous blog, the root WP instance at whatsonyourbrain.com was the first WordPress, moreover, the the first blog i had ever experimented with, so although i was excited to experiment with the available themes, and facinated by their seamless integration– as if they were meant to be there as part of the available styles (we know this isn’t the case, as the available themes are typically authored by other WP users)– i was really more concerned with just getting into the dashboard and learning how to author content in a blog.

Now that I have a little experience with the matter of blogging, and WordPress (1.5 & 2.x) particularly, i decided that i was going to spend more time on my theme for the Pocket Reference. I downloaded all of the available themes (and styles, including the WP Style Switcher plugin component) available at the web site of WordPress, CSS, PHP, web developer guru, Alex King. I thought it was going to be quite the time consuming effort to d/l and install all of those themes, but i found a way to do it in no time at all by using the Firefox Extension, Flashgot in conjunction with Free Download Manager, two extraordinarily useful free utilities for download management. Once I extracted all of the themes from the .zip archives in which they are delivered, to install them in this WordPress 2.0, all I had to do was upload them into he …/wp-content/themes/ directory, and i was ready to begin my assement of which theme would be the default theme for the new Blog.

To keep track of my preferences, I made a “Page” — which by the way could be a nice way to start the “pages” section of your Word Press installation, if you haven’t done so yet. I titled that page “Favorite Themes” (pretty creative, huh?) and using Firefox with three tabs open, I left the Dashboard Page-editer open in one tab so i could make comment about which theme i was testing, then i used the second tab for selecting the thems from the “Presentation” section of the WP Admin area, and in the third tab, i had my blog index.php showing as any visitor would see it, and hit refresh each time i set a new theme. In this manner i was able to quickly log my opinion about several themes, and keep that log handy as “Favorite Themes” so any time i wish to try one of my other “favorites”, the log is only a click away– and i can add to it, or change my opinions at any time– thereby keeping a good idea of what style best fits the Blog, for the ultimate presentational benefit.